Holy Grail of Marketing: Creating Viral Marketing Campaigns
Social Networking is all the buzz these days. Big corporations and small business owners are wading in and trying to leverage social networking sites to create viral marketing campaigns. Many mistakenly view “viral marketing” as merely another form of word of mouth advertising.
Seth Godin writes in “Is Viral Marketing the Same as Word of Mouth“:
Viral marketing [does not equal] word of mouth. Here’s why:
Word of mouth is a decaying function. A marketer does something and a consumer tells five or ten friends. And that’s it. It amplifies the marketing action and then fades, usually quickly. A lousy flight on United Airlines is word of mouth. A great meal at Momofuku is word of mouth.
Viral marketing is a compounding function. A marketer does something and then a consumer tells five or ten people. Then then they tell five or ten people. And it repeats. And grows and grows. Like a virus spreading through a population. The marketer doesn’t have to actually do anything else. (They can help by making it easier for the word to spread, but in the classic examples, the marketer is out of the loop.)
So it’s easy to see why a viral marketing campaign would be the holy grail for most marketing professionals or business owners. Imagine… creating an ad campaign that you don’t have to pay to have delivered…instead it’s carried by your customers to their friends… and their friends carry the message to their friends. All this is done without any promise of renumeration.
Viral Marketing is indeed the pinnacle of marketing success…the problem is that most attempts at launching “viral marketing campaigns” land FLAT! For every successful one launched, there are hundreds that fail to engage and deliver.
In 7 tricks to Viral Web Marketing Thomas Baekdal writes for tip #3:
Do not try to make advertisements (that sucks)
One of the biggest mistake companies make is when they think viral marketing is just advertisements that people share - it is not. Traditional marketing is about promoting your product, showing how good it is, giving it center stage - and generally being incredibly selfish (and possibly using supermodels or movie stars). But guess what, nobody cares about you!
Viral marketing is all about a good story. When BMW put out BMW Films, the main ingredient was not the cars, but the story. Replace the car with another one, and it would still be great. When Sony made their Bravia TV ads, the product was not even seen - yet everyone remembers it.
So, in true paradoxical fashion… setting out to create a “viral” marketing campaign is the wrong approach. Instead, seek to engage and interact with your customer. CONNECT!!!!
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I agree with that “dont make sux advertisment” or better dont do it. Sometime people are doing mistake, without mistake we can’t learn anything. Maybe you can point out some guideline on how to create a great advertisment? Thanks
I totally agreed on the part where it says , dun make advertisement.
It seriously turns people off , when they see you starts spamming your “advertise skills” to them.
I can say that, up to 80% of the people will not bother you.
So better dun do it