With all the talk about Facebook growing into the biggest website online and developing into a good social media marketing vehicle for businesses (but only if you get a Facebook fan page), you’d think it’s the best thing since green tea. Maybe it is. But will make your marketing campaign go viral?
Let’s just lay one thing out on the table right now. Any social website could make your marketing campaign go viral, but not if you don’t have the right stuff. So what’s the right stuff?
Your content has to have mass appeal. If you serve a very niche market and your content appeals to that niche market well, but not so well to any other market then your content won’t go viral. Even on Facebook. Simply being on the most trafficked website online is not enough to make your content go viral.
Another thing you need is to get your content in front of the right people. Simply sharing your content with ten friends hoping they will push your content to the top of the viral chain isn’t going to cut it. You need to get your content in front of the Facebook movers and shakers. Until you do that, it won’t go viral.
That’s not to say that you should spam the people with the most friends. But you might send them a private message asking if they’ll take a look at your content and share it if they like it.
Viral marketing is about making the right friends in the right places and sharing the right stuff. You can do that on Facebook or anywhere there might be people who will really dig what you have to offer.
There are two types of viral marketing campaigns – successful and unsuccessful. Running either of those is no reflection on your skill as a marketer. Good marketers can have an unsuccessful campaign and bad marketers can get lucky and hit a home run. But there are certain principles of viral marketing that should be followed if you want your campaign to have a chance at success.
No. 1, whatever it is you are trying to promote should have some kind of popular appeal. You may have the very best motorized widget on the planet, but if your target market is smaller than a little league baseball team then quality is a small consideration. An idea has to have some popular appeal if it is to ever go viral.
Secondly, it helps get your idea into the hands of a few well connected individuals. Your product or service can be high quality and popular, but if you can’t get at least one well connected person with influence to plug it then chances are you’ll have a hard time getting it to go viral. I hate to plug it as a popularity contest, but that’s what it is. Even 100,000 average Joes won’t have as much influence as 1 kingpin with 100,000 average Joe devotees.
That last sentence needs some elaboration. 100,000 average Joes have friends and their friends listen to them, but they have no one to appeal to as an authority but themselves. The 100,000 average Joes who follow King Cheese, however, can always point to King Cheese as the authority. “Hey,” they could say to their friends, “If you don’t believe me then listen to King Cheese; he’s the man.” Those kinds of appeals work so it’s important to have at least one highly popular and influential person to like your idea enough to promote it.
Finally, your product or service has to have quality. It can be popular, but if it isn’t full of quality then popularity will wane.
Here’s to your next viral marketing campaign. May it be successful.
The first thing you should do before you embark on that new viral marketing campaign is to give your website content a complete look over and overhaul it, if necessary. Let’s face it. If your site is more than five years old then chances are it needs an overhaul. So do it.
What does an overhaul mean, exactly?
First, it doesn’t mean redesigning your site from scratch – though that might not be a bad idea either. It may not even mean changing every word on the site. What it probably means, at least in most cases, is to rewrite the content so that it has more a now feel to it and not an outdated feel.
If the information on your site is outdated then you definitely need to rewrite it so that it is more up to date and contains accurate information. For some sites that might mean a complete overhaul. For other sites it could mean simply tweaking a few words or lines here or there to keep the information up to date. Every site is different so every site has different needs.
The bottom line: Viral marketing won’t work if your site is out of date. Keep the content current.
OK, this might come as a shock to you, but two of the best methods of viral marketing are right under your nose and the chances are you’re already using them.
Ready? Brace yourself. The two forms of viral marketing right under your nose (and that you are probably already doing) are:
- Blogging
- Facebook
OK, now tell me you didn’t see that coming.
First, blogging. There are a lot of reasons why blogging can be viewed as one of the best methods of viral marketing. But, truth be told, it’s even better when matched up with other social media marketing methods like Facebook and Twitter. And … real time search has made it even more important because your blog posts can be indexed and set aside as a part of the real time search results giving them even greater exposure than ever before. The only thing you need to do is create great content that others will be happy to share.
Then, there’s Facebook. Facebook is like a party. That means there is more than just one way to get in. Not only can you make friends and share your blog posts and other interests with those friends, but you can also build a fan page with all sorts of great features that will attract followers and you can also build apps that get passed around and used. Both of those Facebook marketing tools can easily make your website an instant viral sensation.
Viral marketing is nothing new. It’s been around awhile in various forms. And blogging and Facebook are not the only methods of viral marketing online. But they are right under your nose and there’s a real good chance you’re already doing them. Need help making them viral?
Just about every expert in viral marketing agrees on three key principles:
- Success depends on the crowd
- Give away value before asking to receive any in return
- Make it easy for others to share
No viral marketing campaign can succeed without word of mouth. Indeed, word of mouth IS viral marketing. The necessary ingredient is that what you offer is so valuable that others will willingly tell their friends.
Before you can expect anyone to spread the word about your offer, however, you’ve got to give something away. Give away value and you’ll have reason to expect others to give you something valuable in return.
Finally, in order to ensure that others will willingly share what you have to offer, you’ve got to make it easy for them. If you make it too difficult for others to share what you have to offer then they won’t help you. So the key to effective viral marketing is to give away free value and to make it easy for others to share with their friends. Do those two things and the crowd will help you succeed.
Viral marketing is not so much a method as it is a skill. You can perform a viral marketing campaign in a lot of different ways. Some of them are more effective than others. Some may be more effective for different types of businesses even. Some types of viral marketing that marketers have tried in the past include:
- Article marketing
- Blogging
- Link baiting
- Link building
- Video marketing
- Podcasting
- Forum marketing
- Social media marketing
- Social bookmarking
Which of these methods you use for your viral marketing campaign depends a great deal on your goals, your strengths and your audience. For a long time article marketing was considered the king of viral marketing. Then it was blogging. These days it is video marketing. But the best viral marketing campaign is a mixed campaign that uses more than one method and incorporates a strategy of cross-pollination.
Viral marketing is much more sophisticated than it used to be. It is rare that someone mass submits hundreds of articles in one day to thousands of article directories and expects to get a flood of new traffic to their website that converts. Sure, it happens. But it’s rare.
Today, viral marketing is more about the Wow Factor. You’ve got to the wow the audience before you get them to your site. If you don’t wow them until they get their then it’s too late. So what are the tools for producing the wow effect that will get new visitors to your site?
- Articles
- Social bookmarking websites
- Social sites like Facebook and Twitter
- Videos
- Blogs
In the old days of viral marketing, the product was mostly content. Today it is largely social. Look at the list – social bookmarking, social networking, videos (think YouTube, a social network that is also the No. 2 search engine), and blogs (a medium that is half social and half SEO tool). See the theme?
So the question is, how do you kill a viral marketing campaign? Take it out of its social context. Be anti-social.
Viral marketing is social media marketing on steroids. It is, in a word, the maximum effective use of the combination of social media and SEO. Want to kill it? Just break one of those two legs of the viral marketing stool and your campaign will fall on its face.
You’ve likely heard of the Jay Leno – Conan O’Brien rivalry that happened over an NBC late night spot. NBC and Jay Leno blamed Conan O’Brien for failing ratings when it was likely due to a younger audience being more interested in the Internet as medium than television. Just as TV replaced radio and relegated it second-class status, the Internet is fast doing the same to TV. Unfortunately for Conan O’Brien, he got caught up in that.
However, unfortunately for Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien and his fans are more Web-savvy so you could say they are the future.
Pace Lattin does a good job of defending that position in a SiteProNews article. After Conan’s abrupt release from NBC, the late night funny man and his fans went on the viral attack and saved his reputation for another generation. That’s the lesson. Never discount a comic whose face is in the mud. He’ll make mud pies and spread them all over cyberspace. Isn’t viral marketing fun?
E-books were very popular at one time. When the Web was young you’d see the free e-book downloads and when you got to the last chapter of a 200-page e-book you got for free you suddenly realized you were in the middle of a sales pitch. To get the next e-book you’d have to pay something. But you were encouraged to share the free one with your friends.
Another version of the e-book viral marketing method was to offer downloaders a way to brand the free e-book under their own name as long as nothing in the e-book changed. Of course, all the links pointed to the originator’s website. Viral marketing at its best.
For awhile, free e-books went out of fashion. But they seem to be making a comeback. This might be due to the increase and interest in e-book readers. Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble’s Nook and the Sony eReader have all become more popular. So too have e-books.
The truth is, e-books are a great way to spread a viral message. They work. If you do it right you can gain a new audience and sell your services. Viral marketing through e-books is one of the most powerful ways to reach an audience online today. Some things never change.
Viral marketing has undergone a few changes over the years. In the early days article marketing was considered viral marketing. And e-mail marketing carried with it some viral components as well. Then blogging started catching on and viral marketers started employing blogs to great effect.
Along with blogs came RSS – really simple syndication. Bloggers found that people would subscribe to their feeds and read them in their e-mail. After blogging, there was social bookmarking. And social networking to a great extent.
In 2005, video marketing started taking off. Then Facebook and Twitter took off big. What’s next?
I think 2010 will see a resurgence of video marketing and this will likely be the year for mobile marketing as well. Viral marketing is about to get more complex. Only the most savvy of marketers will be able to pull off a real successful viral marketing campaign as it will likely require a multi-tiered approach employing several viral marketing methods from the past.
There are as many ways to succeed at viral marketing as their are people doing marketing online. There is no one right way to conduct a viral marketing campaign. But there is one common element to every viral marketing campaign and there always will be. If you can tap into that one element then your chances of succeeding are greatly enhanced.
So what’s the key?
The key to any successful viral marketing campaigns to solicit others to do your marketing for you. How do you do that? There’s a real simple way to get others do your marketing for you – offer something of value.
Yes, that’s it. Make sure you offer something of value for free to those other people and they will do your marketing for you if they believe in what you are doing.
It is getting harder and harder to conduct a viral marketing campaign online due to the low barrier to entry and the number of people competing for attention. Your offer has to be outstanding. You have to offer something that is free and that people will find of value. Strike a nerve and they will promote your offering for you.
Mention viral marketing in a crowded room and you are likely to create a stampede. People will run to get away from the virus. But viral marketing is not bad. It won’t make you sick and it won’t spread to make anyone else sick, though it might spread to make them happy.
In a word, viral marketing is simply a method of getting the word out about what you have to offer that utilizes other people’s resources to spread a message quickly. The latest tool that has been used for this kind of communication is Twitter. This social networking tool has been used for everything from selling products and services to warn people of impending disaster, or spreading the news about disaster that just happened. It’s a powerful tool.
Though Twitter is a powerful viral marketing tool, it’s not the only tool that can be used for this purpose. Other social networks like Facebook and YouTube can be used as well. When you use these types of services to spread your message to others and persuade them to help you, that’s viral marketing. It’s fun, it’s catchy and it’s good.
Google controls the social web?
It’s not hard to imagine. Besides the search engines, the most popular websites in cyberspace are social sites (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter). And Google is in the race to control the social web with such tools as Google Wave and Google Friend Connect. Plus, real-time search, personalized search, Google Reader, and the list goes on. What will happen when Google controls the social web?
Viral marketing will always be the same. Friends tell friends and they tell friends. But I have a feeling that when Google is involved the terms and results will explode beyond imagination.
Many small business owners still wonder “just what is viral marketing?” It’s a good question. Isn’t it related to social media marketing?
Well, sort of. There is a difference.
Social media marketing is any marketing that utilizes social media as its primary distribution model. Viral marketing can often be accomplished through social media, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be in order to achieve its desired effects.
So what are those desired effects?
Viral marketing – the heart of it – is really about getting others to share your information with their friends through voluntary efforts. When you have that being done on a mass scale, your content is said to “viral.” That is, your viral marketing campaign is successful. The question, how do get that to happen?
There are various strategies for succeeding at viral marketing. First, your content has to be worthy of sharing. If it doesn’t interest readers then readers won’t share it with their friends. So the most important thing is to make your content super content. Then, you’ve got to get it front of the eyes of influential people. Find the most connected and influential people in any circle and get them to view your content. If they like it they will share it. After that, it’s a matter to giving your content a little nudge here and there. Successful viral marketing is achievable.
Earlier in December, Google announced that personalized search will apply to all searchers even if they are not logged into their accounts. That means they will be getting personalized search results on every search query. Will that benefit you or hurt you?
I don’t think it will hurt you if you are SEOing your web pages the same way you have been. Effective SEO is effective SEO.
However, personalized search may not do you any favors if you don’t consider one very important detail: Searchers who find your competition before they find you and like what they see may never find you. That’s why it is very important to do everything you can to ensure that your website is found. And that means expanding your Internet marketing efforts beyond the organic search listings.
It is more important now than ever that you use every available means to get traffic to your website and that your website offers a solid user experience so that your visitors want to keep coming back. Otherwise, you could be relegated to irrelevance forever.
Viral marketing can play a key role in this. All you need is one really relevant viral marketing campaign to get a load of traffic to your site and convince them they want to stick around. That’s the hard part. The easy part is knowing that’s what you need.
When it comes to personalized search, it’s not the end of the world. It’s only the end of the world for those websites that can’t leverage their marketing efforts in the right way.
Now that the search engines have introduced real-time search as a part of the search results, you can bet the viral marketers are beating down every path to find a way to capitalize and exploit every opportunity. But how many opportunities are there in real-time search?
Well, the opportunities are there, but you have to know how to find them. The website that gets the most attention in real-time discussions is Twitter, but real-time and Twitter are not necessarily synonymous. When it comes to search, the search engines throw in results from a variety of sources – not just the most popular ones.
For instance, Google “Dallas Cowboys” and you’ll get results in real time from Twitter and a variety of news sources as well as the Cowboys’ own website. Run the same query at Bing and you may not get real time results at all (I didn’t).
By the same token, you could just as well get results from Facebook, Flickr, or YouTube in your real-time results.
But how do you capitalize on the viral opportunities? Well, if you focus on the social media sites that are relevant to your marketing offering and just run a viral marketing campaign the same way you normally would then your efforts stand a much better chance of appearing in real-time results if you are successful at going viral. In other words, instead of focusing on getting into the real-time results for a relevant search query you should focus on prosecuting an effective viral marketing campaign and the real-time results will take care of themselves.
Going viral is a lot more difficult than it used to be. Which is a bit ironic because there are a lot more people online to see what you have to offer. But, of course, there are a lot more people competing against your for interest too. And that’s why it is so hard.
Viral marketing consists of two things:
- Quality product, service, or message
- Serendipitous discovery
The first of those really needs no introduction. If your product, service, or message isn’t worth telling people about then it won’t go viral. No one’s going to tell their friends about something they don’t find interesting or worth telling about. It’s the second quality – serendipity – that could make or break you.
Serendipity is often thought of as luck, but it’s really more than that. It’s a kind of luck, but not like a roll of the dice or a pick of the draw. It’s more like a planned kind of luck. Serendipity happens to those who expect it and pursue it. But it does happen. It just doesn’t happen because you pursue it.
Sound like a jumble of words? It’s not. Viral marketing is all about making friends. And helping your friends see the value in what you see value in and encouraging them to share that insight with their friends. If there is real value in your perception then you could go viral. Serendipity.
So the question, “How many friends do you have” is somewhat rhetorical. You could have all the friends in the world, but if none of them see the same value that you see then viral won’t happen. But if you have something valuable to offer and no one to offer it to – well, you get the idea. It takes both. A valuable product, service or message and an audience ready and willing to see the value in it. That last one is the thing you’ve got to pursue. It won’t come to you.
If you want to run a successful viral marketing campaign there are two absolutely essential nonnegotiable elements you must infuse into your content. If you have these two essential ingredients then your content may go viral. It isn’t guaranteed to go viral, but it is guaranteed NOT to go viral if your content does not have these two essential ingredients.
So what are they, these two ingredients?
The first absolutely essential ingredient to any viral marketing campaign is a message that resonates. You have to produce content that gets people emotional. It must anger them or make them fall in love. It can produce a positive feeling or a negative feeling, but it has to elicit a strong reaction. Otherwise, people will ignore it and your message will not go viral.
The second ingredient to a successful viral marketing campaign is easy accessibility. Your content must be accessible to anyone anywhere. In other words, it cannot be behind a paywall. If people have to jump through hoops to get to your content then they won’t share it with their friends. They won’t even experience it for themselves. You’ll kill your viral marketing campaign before it begins.
That’s it. Any viral marketing campaign that even hopes to succeed must, at a minimum, possess these two qualities. Otherwise, you might as well just hang up your viral hat.
You’ve likely heard enough of viral marketing that you are beginning to wonder whether or not it is all hype or whether you have any hope. Truth is, much of it is hype. But the flip side to the truth is it’s not all hype. You do have hope.
But pulling off a successful viral marketing campaign is not easy. You can’t just throw together an idea and in 24 hours see a groundswell of viral activity all because you rubbed a few stones together. It does take some thought and energy to pull a good viral marketing effort off and it helps to know a little bit about human psychology. What makes people tick? What would make someone want to help you spread your message?
Viral marketing is a bit of a double-edge sword. If it works, great. If it doesn’t it can also backfire. You could actually see some negative repercussions. That’s because you can’t predict how people are going to react to your efforts.
When it comes to viral marketing, there’s no one solution that will work for everyone. It takes good planning and a fair amount of trust in human nature.
Twitter has a new widget that will surely be used as a viral marketing tool and has a lot of great potential. It’s called the Twitter List Widget.
If you haven’t heard, a couple of weeks ago Twitter introduced Twitter Lists. People have been going hog wild crazy over them. There are now thousands of lists on Twitter and the list of lists is growing. The list feature itself has grown into a viral marketing tool.
Now, you can take your own lists or anyone else’s list and create a widget for it, put it on your blog, and share it with the world. It’s one more viral marketing tool that you can use to spread the word about your brand.
To learn more about Twitter List Widgets and other viral marketing tools, visit Reciprocal Consulting.
