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!!!!
The Value of Free in Business Marketing
About five years ago, I “shut off” my main business web site (before it was a blog) Virtual Impax to the search engines. It was a conscious and deliberate decision. I hid my web site’s navigation bar inside a javascript and did not include an XML site map.
Why in the world would I do such a thing? Because at the time, the 2nd most popular search term after “web development” was “FREE web development”. My practice was busy and growing based upon client referrals and it got to the point where I really didn’t want to deal with the “gimme something for nuttin” crowd.
As a group, these people were a huge drain on my time and energy and they gave little back. The “freebie seekers” I encountered were relentless in their pursuit of obtaining free information and services. They wanted only the best and were an exaggerated case of “champagne taste on a water from the nearest stream” budget.
One thing I’ve noticed in my practice is that every time I raised my rates, the number of “problem” clients dropped dramatically. Fortunately, they were quickly replaced by a “higher quality” client. Betsy Talbot of the Small Business blog noticed a similar phenomenon:
When I stopped having all those free coffee dates my income went up and my interactions were more meaningful.
The Wordpress Pad seems to weigh in on the side of “anti-free”….. in The Value of “Free” on the Web:
The most natural thing as a consumer is to assume that pricey things are worth more than cheap things. This may not always be the case, but we’ve been trained well enough to believe it despite evidence to the contrary in some cases. Regardless, you shouldn’t expect to get a good website for free, just a cheap one.
Free web sites aside, is there value in offering “free” products and services in the name of marketing? Debbie Weil thinks there is. She heralds Tom Peter’s freely distributed promotional materials on his blog as a brilliant marketing move, calling it “cost-free viral marketing”.
I think this is truly a case of where the “brand” or “reputation” of the person or company offering the “freebie”.
In Seth Godin’s post The Thing About Free Godin says:
“When I do a non profit seminar (they’re always free), the number of people who say, “yes I’m coming” and the number of people who come is not the same. So, if I have room for ten, do I do a seminar for eight, or do I book 12 seats and play airline seat manager for the day?”
While Seth Godin’s “show up for free” ratio appears to be roughly 80%, I have clients who are not on “par” with Seth Godin’s or Tom Peter’s stature who consider themselves lucky to get 20% of “free” participants to show up for a seminar.
Bob Warfield writes in his post Does Free Really have Value?
“I’m concerned that free has become undifferentiated and that it now has a lot less value than we think. It is the last refuge when you’ve no idea whether you have a good idea or can sell it, so you loudly proclaim it’s free and wait for the huddled masses to assemble at your doorstep. Except, it’s not enough any more.”
It appears free just isn’t what it used to be in the age of Web 2.0, at least for the “little guy or gal”. The Blog Herald’s “free” marketing experiment yielded similar results. David Peralty writes in The Value of Free Information
“[my free video experiment]… really showed me that the community doesn’t really respect free things. I then added the video option to one of my paid consulting pages, and have had more requests for it since then, than I ever had when it was a free thing I was trying. As soon as I put a monetary value on my time and effort, people started to respect the offering much more.”
It appears there are two types of “free” resources. Those your visitors perceive as “worth while” and those your visitors perceive as “worth less”. If you’re a best selling author, giving away freebies is seen as creating a cost free viral marketing campaign. If you’re anything less.. then your freebie may be perceived as lacking value and a desperate attempt at attention.
What’s your experience with giving away things for free?
Learning is THE KEY to Achieving Success
The other day, I walked in on the last few minutes of the MTV documentary series True Life: I’m Dead Broke which had the attention of my children who range in age from 13-20. I plopped down and they brought me up to speed on the backgrounds of the three participants. I noticed on thing they ALL had in common… they hadn’t finished high school. They either didn’t know or didn’t want to know how to LEARN.
That’s a huge theme in my house as I raise three children…. you’d better KNOW how to LEARN. What’s most important is not that you know it now…but rather you’d better be equipped to LEARN what you need to know. As Alex Ragone says in his Learning Blog
“You can’t keep up with all of the information, so don’t try.”
While you can’t keep up with the explosion of easily accessible information available today, I can’t think of a more important skill in business than the ability to learn. Learning is not something that ends with a diploma or a degree.
The Experiential Learning blog says:
The traditional boundaries of education are beginning to break down. … Education is shifting from a period of formality to informality. Even more than ever before we will see students experiencing the material instead of memorizing it, then sharing their knowledge with their peers instead of handing in the exam to be marked.
John Hoff talks about learning in business in his post, The Dumbest Thing I’ve Ever Heard - You Never Learn From Your Successes
According to John… the lessons learned from failure are not better than the lessons learned from success. As a matter of fact, John believes the reverse is true.
Vince Lombardi is reported to have said,
“Practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect.”
If Vince is right, then it definitely makes sense that the BEST lessons learned in business would be the lessons learned from success!
