Viral Marketing Rules

Props to Karl Long at Experience Curve for his post, 3 Rules For Managing Viral Marketing - What Every CMO Needs to Know. I especially like this thread:

So why is viral marketing different from traditional marketing? Let me throw out some ideas:

• Success bares no relation to investment - Traditional marketing there was generally a relationship between how much you spent and how many people saw your message, there is no such relationship in Viral Marketing
• Viral Marketing does not have a timeline - Traditional marketing calendars, and even the traditional marketing plan is irrelevant when executing and responding to viral marketing efforts. Viral marketing is just not that predictable, which calls for a different kind of planning
• Number of views bare little relation to reach or impact of Viral Marketing - As viral is something that is shared from person to person, you can be sure that many more people hear about it than view it (a little esoteric I know, but I talk about subserviantChicken constantly, and yet have only been to the site once)

Keep up the great work, Karl!

Comments

[GrahamHill]

John

In all the buzz about inside-out viral marketing through customers, everyone seems to be forgetting the equally important corollary of inside-inside viral marketing through colleagues and partners.

The obvious application is in organisational change communications.

There is considerable evidence that viral communications about an organisational change (commonly known as the grapevine) is what makes or breaks a successful organisational change programme.

Graham Hill
Independent Management Consultant

[John]

Graham -

Great thought. I always find it interesting that when helping companies listen to their customers the biggest challenge is telling the customer's story inside the company in a way that can be scalable.

[Jack Yan]

Very true, John: deadlines, even in the days of Web 1·0, had different meanings. News sites did not have a closing time to make the printers; perhaps as a parallel, viral marketing efforts are open, evolving, and are often aimed at a future trend, not a present one. Hence, the time-frame for a marketing project, as we knew it, is irrelevant.

[John]

The fluidity is what makes companies have a difficult time with viral marketing. Most take a top-down approach instead of jumping in the cultural river and participating in this fluidity.