Can Viral Marketing Take Place Offline?
Viral marketing – is it just for online marketers or can it take place off line as well?
Viral marketing is just another name for word of mouth. It can manifest itself in any number of ways, online or off line. For instance, online viral marketing can occur when a video grows popular because many people have bookmarked it or shared it with their friends. Maybe they sent the link by e-mail or they bookmarked it on their favorite social bookmarking site. Perhaps they favorited it on YouTube or shared the link on Twitter or Facebook. The fact that a lot of people shared the video in a short period of time means the video has gone “viral”.
This phenomenon takes place off line in the same way. Suppose you open up an ice cream shop in your neighborhood. On your first day of business you get only 10 customers. But all 10 of those customers tell five friends, each of whom visit your store the next day.
That’s 50 customers on day 2. But what if those 5 customers told 10 of their friends about your ice cream shop? They e-mailed their friends, called them on the phone, talked to them at church or school. Wherever they bumped into their friends, you were mentioned.
Now you have 510 people who know about your ice cream shop. On day three suppose that half of your first day customers came back to visit you again. And suppose 20% of your second day customers returned. Furthermore, suppose that half of the people they told about your shop came in as well. On day 3 of your shop you’d have 265 customers. Now you’re really growing!
Now, suppose those customers each told 5 of their friends about you. And they all came into your ice cream shop some time over the seven days. Getting the picture yet?
Viral marketing can, and often does, take place off line as well as online. The key is to provide a remarkable service, something that people will talk about. If you can do that then you’ll go viral, whether you are online or off line.
3 Must-Do Things For Going Viral On StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon is a social media service that allows web users an opportunity to show their like for a web page by “thumbing” it up or to show their dislike by “thumbing” it down. The service has a reputation for two things:
- Sending lots of traffic to many websites
- Being responsible for high bounce rates and low conversion rates
Many webmasters use that second point to justify not using StumbleUpon at all, but that is a msitake. It is true that conversion rates are low and bounce rates are high as many people will stumble a site sent to them by a friend then immediately leave without really reading what they stumbled. Of course, users on other social media sites do the same thing.
But it is possible to go viral on StumbleUpon. And when you do you’ll be really excited that you got some Stumble notoriety.
If you do the following three things on StumbleUpon you’ll greatly increase your chances of going viral and getting a reaction from your Stumble traffic.
- Write a killer headline. Content is good, but no matter how well written and compelling your content is, if your headline doesn’t grab people’s attention then they will never read your content. Make your headline outstanding.
- Get rid of the popups. Most people don’t like them and if your site is full of popup advertising and other annoying web pests then Stumblers will not give it a thumbs up.
- Be active. Don’t just stumble your own content. Be active in stumbling the content of your friends and other users. Use the StumbleUpon toolbar to send a note to your most trusted friends about a page you want stumbled. Let someone else be the discoverer. If you thumbs up your own content and that’s all you do then you could get banned.
Going viral on StumbleUpon is not as hard as it seems. It is possible, but you’ve got to have great content that starts with a great headline and a clean site free of annoying ads.
Why Hotmail Is A Viral Marketing Pioneer
It is generally recognized that Hotmail was the first successful viral marketer. Started in 1996 by two visionaries of Internet marketing, the plan was simply to provide free e-mail addresses to anyone who wanted them. Whenever someone signed up for an account and began sending e-mails there was a message at the bottom of the e-mail inviting the recipient to get a free e-mail address. The more people who used the service the more Hotmail received free advertising and the more people signed up to use the service. It was an overnight phenomenon.
Hotmail was also followed by other copycat services – free web-based e-mail services. And that was really the beginning of viral marketing. After Hotmail, other marketers began to see opportunities to promote themselves for free or to get other people to promote their offerings for free.
Viral marketing works on that principle. Get others to do your marketing for you and if it is successful then an idea can take off and spread virally in a very short period of time.
Hotmail may have been first, but there are other ideas that have gone viral since Hotmail. YouTube has been instrumental in seeing certain videos spread rapidly. Other social networks like Digg, MySpace, Facebook and Twitter have also done well in helping ideas to spread. And, of course, e-mail is a viral marketing mainstay.
No matter the medium, if you have a hot idea and you can get that idea to catch on then you can have a viral marketing sensation.
Viral Marketing With Facebook Apps
Facebook has caught a lot of attention in the last year or so. Rivaling Google in terms of traffic, it has become a sort of powerhouse on its own for sending traffic to websites and for online marketing in general. Of course, it can be – and has been – used as its own viral marketing tool. But there is one other aspect to Facebook that has a lot of potential when it comes to viral marketing.
I’m talking about Facebook Apps.
You’ve seen them. Your friends send you the requests for kisses on the cheek, vampire bats and reading naked in the dark. They’re called apps and despite their silliness, they can be used for marketing your small business.
If you develop a really useful Facebook app then it will receive a lot of downloads and get a lot of usage. Every time someone uses your app they’ll be marketing your company.
To develop your own Facebook app you’ll need to get a developer’s API and go to work. Try to create an app that is somehow related to your business or something that is useful to your target audience. If your audience likes your app and finds it useful in some way then they’ll share it with their friends and you’ll get more downloads. As a result, you’ll get more traffic to your Facebook fan page and your web property.
Can all this result in viral activity? Yes, it sure can. And some companies are already doing it. You can too.
Can Viral Marketing Be Local?
According to WebProNews, more Americans are connecting with their neighbors and other locals over the Internet. This is a pretty significant development and could mean that local Internet marketing is about to get a huge boost. That could be both good and bad.
Among the things that could happen locally are:
- An increase in spam
- A greater potential for more viral marketing campaigns
- A boom in local search engine marketing
- More social media involvement at the local level
And who knows the potential for any of these?
On the viral marketing front, anything that catches on locally and seems to move on its own without much effort could become viral in seconds. Through Facebook, Twitter, SMS or local forums and community websites, content could go viral just with a simple nudge. But local viral marketing campaigns still must follow the same rules and principles as all other viral campaigns. On that we can rely.
E-books: Are They Viral?
At one time e-books were a great viral marketing tool. But that was a bit of a primitive time. It’s like the Stone Age now. Cool tools, but the hammers we use now do a lot better pounding.
Unfortunately, e-books have not arrived. But they’re not exactly in the Stone Age either. There is a transition.
Thanks to two developments in the e-book publishing industry – the iPad and the Kindle – there is a revitalized interest in e-books. But it seem like the big frustration for consumers is there isn’t one standard. That makes it difficult to get a viral marketing effect with an e-book.
Not impossible. Just difficult. There is still a possibility that an e-book can go viral, but if it does so it will have to go viral in one of three accepted formats:
- Kindle
- iPad
Right now, I’d say e-books are more likely to go viral if they are in PDF format. But you can create a mini-viral effect with either Kindle or iPad versions of your e-book. But the most important thing about e-books going viral is you have to have great content. Mediocre just won’t cut it.
Is Viral Marketing A Planned Event?
Every day almost you hear about a successful viral marketing campaign. Many times they just happen. They’re not planned. And sometimes it isn’t even something that is marketed. It’s just a video or an article that becomes popular for some reason. It’s like serendipity.
But can you plan a viral marketing campaign? Are those things plannable?
Well, every marketer would like to think so. And, in truth, yes, you can plan a viral marketing campaign. But planning something and seeing it through to completion are two different things. Sometimes the plan just doesn’t work out.
So what’s it take to make a viral marketing plan work? It takes more than a plan. I guarantee you that.
However, it starts with a plan. If you don’t plan for the viral marketing campaign – and I mean every detail down to where you intend to submit your content and who your target audience is – then you might as well plan for it to fail. You can’t leave it to happenstance. Or serendipity.
That said, don’t expect your viral marketing campaign to succeed just because you planned it. You have to also monitor your efforts, and your results.
When you’re ready to build a viral marketing campaign and see it through to completion, find a viral marketing expert to guide you through the maze.
Is Facebook Good For Viral Marketing?
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.
Three Qualities Of A Successful Viral Marketing Campaign
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.
Two Forms Of Viral Marketing Right Under Your Nose
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
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?
Key Principles Of Viral Marketing
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.
Which Viral Marketing Method Is More Powerful?
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.
Internet Marketing Is A Mixed Bag Of Tricks
When you embark on a new Internet marketing campaign, don’t think that means you are limited to just one or two strategies. Internet marketing has become a very diverse science (or art, depending on your frame of reference). That means you have more than one tactic at your disposal every day of the week.
Some of the most successful Internet marketing tactics available to new and veteran marketers alike include:
- Search engine optimization
- Pay per click marketing
- Article marketing
- Blog marketing
- Social media marketing
- Viral marketing
- Video marketing
When marketing your business online, don’t limit yourself to just one or two methods of marketing. Start with one or two then add a new Internet marketing strategy every three months. As you add new strategies, continue monitoring each on a weekly basis and adjust your efforts as necessary. What doesn’t work, drop it. Keep doing what does work. Internet marketing is an ever-changing art and science.
How To Kill A Viral Marketing Campaign
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.
Viral Marketing Through E-books
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.
What Will Viral Marketing Look Like In 2010?
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.
The Key To Successful Viral Marketing
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.
Why Viral Marketing Isn’t Bad
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.
What Will Viral Marketing Look Like When …
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.
Is ‘Viral’ Marketing Really Achievable?
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.
Will Personalized Search Boost Your Viral Marketing?
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.
How Viral Is Real-Time Search?
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: How Many Friends Do You Have?
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.
Two Essential Elements To Viral Marketing
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.
Viral Marketing – Hope, Help Or Hype?
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 List Widget Promises To Go Viral
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.
How Viral Is Your Marketing?
There are two ways go viral in Internet marketing:
- Planned
- Spontaneous
Naturally, you can’t plan every thing you do to go viral. It’s nice if you set a plan in motion and it works. But it need not work in order for your message to go viral. The crowd can make it go viral for you.
In order to tap into the spontaneous viral marketing pool you’ve got to have a message, but not just any message. It’s got to be a great message. It’s got to be a message that people will want to share with their friends. If it’s great enough, people will share it without any prompting. And that’s the kind of viral marketing that works best.
Of course, you can always plan a viral marketing campaign. And if you can do that and pull it off, great. But note that just as many attempts to plan a viral marketing fail as succeed.
If you focus on building great content – I mean, really great content – then the viral marketing will take care of itself. All you have to do is give it a nudge and it will go.
The 7 Principles Of Viral Marketing
Dr. Ralph Wilson, one of the early pioneers of viral marketing – and Web marketing in general – showcases 6 principles of viral marketing. These are principles that he says should be a part of every business’s viral marketing campaign, only he says if you have most of them then you’re golden. I’d add another one to the list, but before I tell you what they are I’d like to review Dr. Wilson’s list. His 6 principles of viral marketing are:
- Give something away
- Effortless transfer to others
- Scales easily
- Exploits common human behaviors
- Utilizes existing communication networks
- Takes advantage of the resources of others
These are pretty useful principles. The first one is almost a no-brainer. The idea is to give something away that others can pass on. It must also be easy to pass on to others. In other words, people you give it to should be able to send it to their friends without much fanfare. The freebie must also be scalable, which is a word marketers use to convey growth from small scale to large scale with relative ease. Exploiting common human behaviors gets to the heart of all sales messages – tug on people’s motivators. By utilizing existing communication networks, because you don’t want to have to invent something that people will have to learn to use when they’ve already got the tools you need to distribute what you have and want them to have. And finally, use other people’s resources as much as possible because, after all, if it’s viral you can’t do it all yourself.
This about sums it up. But I’d add one more principle to the list. It’s already in Dr. Wilson’s 6 principles, but it isn’t stated outright – so I’ll just say it. Make it easy. Simple. Don’t complicate things. If you follow Dr. Wilson’s 6 principles of viral marketing then that should automatically happen. Your plan will be simple. As it should be.
The Many Faces Of Viral Marketing
Viral marketing seems to be the new buzz word in Internet marketing. Everyone wants their content to go viral. Everyone wants to see their content get distributed across the entire Web, but not everyone understands just how to make that happen.
The bottom line for any kind of marketing is to ensure that your content is before the eyes of the people who will actually use it. That’s half the battle in viral marketing right there.
Viral marketing can often occur spontaneously. When you share something with a friend and that friend shares it with another friend then that friend shares with another. Now imagine that each friend shares your content with five other friends. It’s easy to see how quickly this process can multiply. Just look at how many friends you can reach after going five levels deep:
- You – Share with 5 friends
- Level 2 – Your 5 friends share with 5 friends each = 25 friends
- Level 3 – Each friend’s friend shares with 5 more = 125 friends
- Level 4 – Each Level 3 friend shares with 5 friends = 625 friends
- Level 5 – Each Level 4 friend shares with 5 friends = 3,125 friends
After five levels of sharing, your content has reached 3,906 people including you and your five friends. Now take that one more level and you’ve touched 19,530 people. That’s how viral marketing works.
But what medium should you use to produce that can result? It depends. Where are the people you want to reach? Are they at StumbleUpon or YouTube? Try it there. How about social bookmarking sites like Digg? If that’s where your audience can be found then that’s where you need to submit your content.
The hardest thing about viral marketing is predicting how people will respond. Not everything that looks hot goes hot. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.
Viral Marketing And Its Changing Face
Viral marketing has changed a bit over the years. In the old days it meant you wrote a few articles and distributed them in various places online to build links and drive traffic back to your website. While article marketing still works when done well, there is so much competition and “noise” that to be really effective in getting your articles to go viral you have to write out-of-this world articles, which you should be doing anyways.
After the dot-com bust of 2000-2001, viral marketing changed a bit. Blogging began to pick up speed and early adopters soon found out that if you wrote a great blog post you could attract a lot of links. Blogging is still on the upswing and can still be effective as a viral tool.
However, video marketing took off in 2004 and 2005 and seems to be picking up speed at the same rate that blogging did just a couple of years before. 2010 looks to be the year of the video. Many Internet marketers have used videos for great viral marketing campaigns and many still continue to experiment with video to great success.
Twitter is another tool that marketers are using to great effect. Many marketers have reported it as a great viral marketing tool in its own right.
Still, viral marketing is ever changing. The best viral campaigns will no longer be relegated to the use of one tool. In the future, viral marketing will become a multi-tiered strategy of its own. Successful viral marketers will devise campaigns that consist of more than one marketing tool and that use many media in conjunction to reach their defined audiences. That’s as it should be. And I’m looking forward to the day when viral marketing isn’t just some buzz word that people use to sound important.