7 observations on Viral Marketing
In my last post "Creating a Viral Marketing Campaign" I wrote about the viral marketing campaign I had launched together with a group of other students. I promised to keep you updated and am now doing so.
Our project to create a viral video faced many problems and we struggled quite a bit to get it going. To be successful we had to be able to get the video an initial push that would be strong enough for it to become viral. This process of "going viral" can be boiled down to a simple equation, the share ratio: How many people one person who has seen the video in average causes to watch the video. If the ratio is below one your campaign is dying. Conversely if the ratio is above the magical number it is going viral and the higher the share ratio the faster it spreads.
Being a class project we had a fixed deadline and unfortunately we did not achieve our goals by that set time. But we did manage to cross the line about two weeks later. We had set the goal to reach at least 10,000 people and that one major newspaper in Singapore would report about our campaign, today our main video has been watched more than 13,000 times, and the Straits Times, Singapore's largest newspaper, wrote about our campaign.
The experiment resulted in seven observations on Viral Marketing which I want to share with you:
1. Fail to Plan; Plan to Fail
Meticulous planning will help your campaign to succeed. Once the plan is nailed down it will change quite frequently while you have to adapt to reality and what is happening with your campaign. But if there is no plan you cannot adapt it and will be lost. Failure to plan therefore is a plan to failure.
2. Social Networks Are Amazingly Powerful
With our campaign we fostered the power of Facebook and it became clear very early on that Facebook is amazingly powerful in sharing a message and promoting a cause. But in strong-tie networks such as Facebook with their closed nature it is difficult to reach people beyond your own circle of friends.
3. Build a Network of Weakly Tied Influencers
To successfully promote a campaign beyond the circle of your strongly tied friends you need to build a network of weakly tied influencers. You need to find people you share a common ground with, that is, people interested in the cause you are trying to promote, and convince them to help you in spreading your message. Only this way will you be able to escape the entanglement of your own social graph.
4. The Ingredients Matter More Than One Thinks
Most viral videos and viral campaigns in general have not gone viral because someone wanted them to, but because the material astonished people. Analyzing Susan Boyle’s “I dreamed a dream” or “The Battle at Kruger”, two of the most successful videos ever on YouTube, it becomes obvious that those videos touch people, they amaze people. This made those videos as successful as they are. But: This does not mean it is impossible to artificially create a viral campaign. It does however mean that the material must be either very creative or genuinely attention-grabbing.
5. Offline Can Help To Drive Online Traffic
To combine an online viral marketing campaign with an offline campaign that relates to people in real life can be a very powerful tool, especially to kick start a campaign. An offline campaign not only drives traffic but also might generate interest among multiplicators such as the press or bloggers.
6. Do Not Ask What People Can Do For Your Campaign
Ask what your campaign can do for the people instead. People in general are egoists and need an incentive to become active on their own. If your video is not astonishingly good, and most videos, especially produced ones, won’t be, additional motivators such as a prize are needed. Such an incentive will cause people to help the campaign while helping themselves. You use people's behavior to promote your campaign.
7. Money Helps
Money can facilitate the process of getting a video viral. A professionally produced video, a highly optimized website, buying ads on websites dealing with the topic, or an offline advertising campaign are some of the things that money can buy and definitely make it easier to spread your message.
Thanks to Jenny Costelloe, Noah Gunzinger, Rajeev Batra, and Sunil Tulsiani for making this post possible.
