Viral Marketing

Viral marketing involves creating a marketing scheme that carries itself. To be truly successful with viral marketing you must create something so funny or so outrageous that people must show it to their friends. Obviously this requires a great deal of ingenuity and creativity.

Many people turn to viral marketing as a way to get an extraordinarily high return from their advertising budget. When you attempt to create shortcuts there will always be downsides. First, there is no guarantee your viral marketing effort will succeed. Unlike traditional marketing schemes there is no cookie-cutter technique for viral marketing.

There are many examples of "viral" web sites and messages. The first two that come to mind are the infamous goatse.cx and "all your base are belong to us." There was no commercial message behind either of these (if there was is was completely missed by everyone.) The absurdity, shock value, and humor made these irresistible"share with your friend" items. Just like playground gossip successful viral websites scream "you gotta see/hear this."

There are important messages to be learned about viral marketing from both goatse and "all your base are belong to us." Both resulted in viewer-produced spin-offs. The tributes to goatse alone speak volumes. Photoshop-edited images are abundant on the web. For goatse, people needed to go the extra distance. Some people baked cakes others carved pumpkins. For all of its viral elements, goatse would unquestionably be a success.

Viral Marketing

Think creating a viral phenomena like that is difficult? Now mix in the marketing elements. Many of the people who were fundamental in making goatse a success (geeks) are the same people who despise commercialism. If they figure out your attempt at viral marketing is little more than "spam" you will fail to reach critical mass. Thats not to say your viral marketing attempt won't be a failure commercially. If you make enough sales to justify a return on both your time and investment that's success.

Just how does your viral marketing campaign manage to bring in sales? You don't want the message to be so subtle that 99.9% of your viewers miss it. At the same time it can't come across as an ad or spam.

Viral Marketing with pictures

On a much smaller scale viral marketing can be achieved with pictures. The idea is that your website's url is embedded as a watermark. People trade the pictures and then visit your site out of curiosity.

Viral Videos

Usually you have an advantage when using videos for viral marketing. People will send the link to their friends rather than video itself. This means traffic to *your* site. Most people are unable to afford the big hosting fees for high bandwidth videos. Occasionally (depending on copyright or not) other sites will host the videos themselves.

Here is where the downside comes in -- watermark removal or replacement. To avoid copyright problems many sites and message boards will remove watermarks from images or require that posting images contain no watermarks. Because of the way that internet traffic works there is a good chance that a big site will post your image, strip the watermark and put their own on it. Sure you could sue them for copyright infringement, but by then the picture is out and thousands of people will have be sharing it and posting it on other sites.

How do you avoid this tricky situation? Don't just watermark the image. Embed your site's url into the image or photograph. This might mean your website is open and clearly vi sable on a computer screen in the photograph. Maybe the person in the image is wearing a t-shirt with your name on it. You can definitely get more creative than this.

I can clearly remember images from many years ago where the site name was "embeded" into the photograph. When it comes to viral marketing that is real success.

In some respects it is more difficult to achieve a successful viral marketing campaign with a mainstream business. You don't want outrageous and obscene imagery to be connected with your business. A kid on a skateboard busting his face in your restaurant's parking lot (with your sign in the background) isn't sending the right message. For other types of businesses this may be more subjective.

Burger King has a viral marketing campaign running with subservientchicken.com. The website was morbidly stupid yet achieved success on the viral level. Was it successful from a marketing standpoint? I don't know. A small business may see a gigantic spike in sales - an obvious sign of success. Did Burger King see any increase in sales? Perhaps subserviant chicken embedded in our minds and will cause us to stop at Burger King rather than McDonalds for many years to come.

The subservientchicken is being seen outside the web as well. I am no follower of the subservientchicken but I saw a commercial on television the other night involving the subservient chicken. I only saw it once and was not exactly sure what the message was. It certainly wasn't buy hamburgers from Burger King. With a slump in unhealthy fast food sales it seems Burger King is relying on viral marketing to gain some sort of edge.

Other video games and movies have used viral marketing elements as well. It is all about the "buzz."

Google had placed billboards with a mathematical message on them that only "smart" people would be able to decode. They then had to figure out a few more mathematical problems before landing on a Google Jobs application site. Of course it only took a few "smart" guys to post the address on message boards and even us "stupid" guys knew about the site. Was this an attempt at viral marketing? The address for the jobs page was not difficult to locate once people posted it. Perhaps they only paid attention to the applications they received within the first couple of days of buying the billboard. Or maybe it was just an attempt at building up the buzz index before their big IPO?

Viral marketing may be one of the few options for low budget marking. If successfully executed viral marketing can give you a great return for the money you put in. However, I do not believe that viral marketing should be an end-all solution to your business's success. If you are relying solely on a viral marketing campaign to bring in sales you may be preparing for failure. If at all possible use viral marketing as a supplement to your marketing budget.

©2004