There is no Such Thing as A Viral Marketing Campaign

Posted on 03. Feb, 2009 by Kelly Feller in Measurement, Social Media

In my role as a social media strategist I’m often asked to review Intel marketing campaigns that contain social elements. And I must say that there are many great examples out there. Two of my favorites are the 2006 What Would You Do for a Duo contest and Mass Animation. Both of these programs include the critical elements needed to make something social/viral: they give our human customers the opportunity to share their personal and creative passions with the world.

Yet there are also many campaigns from Intel and other corporations that claim to be “viral” or social yet don’t necessarily make use of the best practices known to many in the world of social media that would contribute to greater success. Why is that? Well the problem begins with the very categorization of the program as “viral.” Let me be very clear on this: YOU CAN ONLY CREATE A MARKETING PROGRAM…YOUR CUSTOMERS MAKE IT VIRAL OR NOT. As much as we’d like to believe, we cannot make a marketing campaign viral simply because we don’t have budget to promote it. A program is only viral if customers find it interesting enough to share with their family, friends, and community. Therefore it is our job as savvy marketers to make interesting programs and make it as simple as possible for folks to share it with others.

Another problem with many of our viral or social media marketing programs is that our goal is often to make money or influence customer purchase decisions. In a terrific meeting yesterday with social media metrics guru Katie Paine, she reminded me of the primary metric that should be used to measure the success of a social media program: lower costs for your advertising budget. Since you cannot actually track sales generated from these campaigns, she suggests that you measure something you can track and have legitimate control over: cost.

I’ve listed out some other myths that can be debunked about social media/viral marketing below. Please be assured I’m not listing these here to disuade many of you marketers from using social media in your campaigns. On the contrary, I want as many as possible using the myriad tools that exist in this segment to help customers become brand and product advocates for the companies they represent. I simply want everyone to be as successful as possible in all their marketing programs. (Selfishly I also want to minimize my forced exposure to bad marketing, but I digress). We should all be focused on doing better marketing, not more of it.

Other Social Media/Viral Marketing Myths:

Success = more clicks
Contests are a good way to incent people to share things
You need a microsite to do good viral/social marketing
You should stick to an ongoing blog content schedule, even if you have nothing new or interesting to say

Tags: social media campaigns, viral marketing

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8 Comments

Posted in Measurement, Social Media

8 Responses to “There is no Such Thing as A Viral Marketing Campaign”

michaeljbarber

03. Feb, 2009

Kelly…I couldn’t agree with you more. Too many times clients ask us to create “viral” campaigns. I respond “so you want a marketing campaign”, and they say “viral marketing campaign”. I then have to mention there is no such thing as a viral marketing campaign. The very nature of what is and isn’t viral is defined by consumers, and not the marketing campaign. After which, I point out numerous examples. Thanks for the post. Good insight as always.

Cheers,
Michael
Michael Brito

03. Feb, 2009

Excellent Post Kelly. I always say that if you plan for a program to go viral, it won’t; and if it does … it was either luck or someone was doing something shady.
Nicholas Kinports

03. Feb, 2009

Harsh language - but mostly accurate!

Eliminating the word “viral” from marketers’ mouths will take a long time - but they will eventually stop asking for a “viral video” or a “viral microsite”.
Jesse

03. Feb, 2009

Yes, you do just make a marketing program and yes it is up to the customers to ultimately make it go viral. However, as a marketer, there are many different tools/actions in your plan that you can utilize to push the content closer the viral tipping point. I’m sure that’s what clients are looking for when they say they want a viral marketing plan.

Secondly, how do you demonstrate to clients that their SMO campaign was a success? Yes, they lowered their advertising costs, but if you just created a few social network pages and a measly blog, are they getting any kind of return for their investment? Not talking sales here, but brand recognition and community building.
John McPhee

03. Feb, 2009

Nice post Kelly, I couldn’t agree more. A good marketing campaign must focus on the content or experience (much like a top selling product) first. If you create good content that users find useful, funny or informative, they’ll share it with their network. Too many marketers are concerned with “spreading the word” and it feels forced and never works.
Tyler Hurst

04. Feb, 2009

Nice work here. I did a similar post about not being able to create a viral video after being asked repeated times by companies for such. I get what they’re looking for, but viral just isn’t possible to CREATE.
Good to see there’s more smart people out there!
Jeffrey Stewart

07. Feb, 2009

I agree you cannot create a viral campaign, but you can create the basis for conversations to go viral, and you can measure the resultant acitivity and desired call to actions. There are degrees of viral activity. The activity starts with outbound if not 1to1 messegaes that people want to share with others. By tracking this activity you can start to measure the affects of the outbound messages. The point is to start conversations in social media networks. Then let others make recommendations to their ‘friends’. Is it easy? No. Does it work and is it measureable? Yes.
jshuflin

07. Feb, 2009

Virulent conversations can be incubated, coaxed, nurtured, but the virus either has potency in itself or it doesn’t. Our task is to keep anti-viral medications, prophylactics, and habits out of the way. Our task is to “think infected”.