Viral Marketing and Social Media

Viral Growth Copyright Seth Godin

Using social media as a buzz generator has become the thing to do in marketing. You have the perfect smooth media for Experiential Marketing and in theory it is the ultimate viral marketing media. But how come companies are having a hard time making it work? What are the pitfalls?

The issue is that many companies have the mistaken idea that having a large number of followers would be enough to create a good viral buzz.

On the blog post “Viral Growth trumps lots of faux followers”, Seth Godin publishes the results of his studies in this area:

“If you start with 10,000 fans and have an idea that on average nets .8 new people per generation, that means that 10,000 people will pass it on to 8000 people, and then 6400 people, etc. That’s yellow on the graph. Pretty soon, it dies out.

On the other hand, if you start with 100 people (99% less!) and the idea is twice as good (1.5 net passalong) it doesn’t take long before you overtake the other plan. (the green). That’s not even including the compounding of new people getting you people.

But wait! If your idea is just a little more viral, a 1.7 passalong, wow, huge results. Infinity, here we come. That’s the purple (of course.)”

The main problem companies are facing when using social media for viral marketing is the quality of the campaigns. Marketers are becoming blinded by the huge amount of users and forget to develop marketing campaigns that follow the golden rules of Viral Marketing:

• Idea – it needs to appeal to a specific hive (which can eventually “sneeze” the virus to other hives). Remember, when you go viral, you stop selling products and you start selling ideas.

• Sneezers – who do you want to pass on the virus for you? You need to figure out who your powerful sneezers are and engage the most effective promiscuous sneezers.

• Message – The idea needs to be innovative and appealing, so the hive’s powerful sneezers feel that it is worth to spread it to the members of the hive – and to other hives. In other words you need to have interesting content.

• Smoothness – the way you present the message must be easy to pass on. For example YouTube videos are easy to share, “invite friends to join” button, etc.

Besides that you need to understand how the different social media is used in order to get the best of them. Facebook for instance is a “talking to a friend” tool, while Linkedin and Plaxo are more business oriented.
Developing your “company idea” and planning your campaign is not a thing from the past, the communication tools evolve but the basics are still the same: Which Unique Buying Proposition you are communication to whom and through which channel. Concentrate on quality messages to “fewer” quality sneezers than poor messages to a load of people that in the end won’t make a difference for your business.

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