Well, to start with, I was talking online with one of my friends who is pursuing her HR in Canada this morning. We generally talk about lots of stuff, and today she remarked ‘why be such a pessimist’? And well I realised yes, that’s it!
Being a Social Media Marketing Evangelist –
What do I do she asked, and I started giving her all the fundas and tips and tricks on all what goes on and is going on and what’s the way ahead: which I wrote in my previous post: what would Social Media be in 2009 and then it struck me are we going the right way?
What is Viral Marketing? How do you define the success of your Viral campaign? How do you creae that Oh! So awesome viral message which your followers would take forward?
I know these are common questions anyone can think of, but what I am stuck with is this: Does your Oh! so Viral Campaign really markets you out?
Well, and the next thing I did was to Google on the topic and what I found was this: a classic Seth Godin post, what is viral marketing, Seth raises a very crucial point here:
There are two kinds of Viral marketing:
- Viral Marketing
- The original classic sort in which the marketing is the product and which a self-amplifying cycle occurs. Hotmail, for example, or YouTube. The more people use them, the more people see them. The more people see them, the more people use them. The product or service must be something that improves once more people use it.
- A second kind has evolved over the last few years, and that’s a marketing campaign that spreads but isn’t the product itself. Shepard Fairey’s poster of Barack Obama was everywhere, because people chose to spread it. It was viral (it spread) and it was marketing (because it made an argument–a visual one–for a candidate.
- text taken from Seth Godin’s blog: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/12/what-is-viral-m.html
And I was amazed to think how my thought process connected with Seth’s
Well, What I have been rattling my brains over is does your Viral campaign really achieves your marketing purpose?
And Seth does answer this question in a really effective manner: He says Virality is not a feature that you attach to your campaign.
The critical element of viral marketing is this: it’s built in. It was built into Hotmail and built into YouTube. The more people used the camera on their cell phones, the more the idea spread, the more people wanted a camera.
What do I feel?
Well, Viral Marketing is not a value-added-service. In fact it is in-built. Its inside your offering. So the game changes here.
The Game changes here – for marketers
For all those marketers who have been selling over time and doing all the things possible to reach to the clients, trying to customize the offering according to the needs, and expecting WOMM (word of mouth marketing) to happen, the game has changed.
There have been a number of Un-successful attempts at Viral marketing. To tell you about an interesting one I saw a few days back is the “AdultDost.com” a Viral Marketing message for Tata Sky done by a media company. Well looking at the name doesnot it sound like an adult site? And YES! the message works!
You think it is, and you go there and well, the rest is “I went there, I liked it and I am blogging about it”
Its not about creating that message, It’s about: Creating a message that would be of value to the target market that you are creating the message for!
Go Viral…this new year.
