Viral Marketing + How To = think of why youngsters trade cards
How does a marketing or communication campaign turns viral? That’s the question all the communication agencies are trying to answer when their clients call them saying as a strategic brief: “I want you to make the next Coke + Mentos viral video”. When I think of not so old time I had to face my boss telling him: “there’s no sense making a video, they should care more on their mediocre products than on their marketing for the moment” (yes I know it’s a cheap answer). But after been forced to watch so many lame self labeled “Viral videos”, and fortunately for me lots of amazing, hilarious, engaging videos, I’ve to say there’s some common points to videos going viral. Here’s the list.
As B.L. Ochman says in her blog post “The formula for successful viral campaigns. Not!“, there’s no process or check list to cook a viral video, or create a viral campaign. Or maybe it does exist, but agencies are so full of marketing stuff that they can’t open their minds to new things (at least web agencies that are asked to do viral videos).
What’s viral (and where online marketing campaigns tend to go) isn’t the content but the fact to share with others the content served by brands. And what agencies figure out is how to package the content to create the most useful context to release the video (or other kind of content).
Did you see that I wasn’t speaking anymore of video? The reason’s simple: agencies are great at making great content. They just need a customer insight to make it right, but they’re lacking knowledge about how people share online. And that’s how you can make a video spread faster and wider than average TV ads (and don’t think that cost less than TV, that generate more value — but you need to be able to collect data to measure it, that’s another issue)
Ok, now you’ve get enough noticed of not just looking for a killer video but to have a deep interest in contexte. We can have a look at what kind of context you should create to make your video spread:
- Get supported by an existing community: don’t just create a content nobody cares about. Aiming at a specific community makes you easier with early stage targets to get in touch with. Since you would need first readers/ viewers, make them be community influencers (that’s the agency job to find out who they are). And one tip to be sure to entertain your targets so that they’ll share for sure that content is to include them into the creation process (no need to let them create by themself, but make them assist your agency work)
- Create ready to share content; I’ve been for long saying that, make the sharing process the fastest possible; which means you have to work on uploading your content to sharing platforms (Youtube, SlideShare, …), create a mini website to let them link to a consistent URL, write down easily customizable and re shareable information emails
- Give your early sharers the feeling they’ve got a valuable info: put a part of the budget into an online teasing campaign. But don’t misunderstand me, they have to notice what you’ve send is valuable, not that they are valuable.
The major item is to have targeted the right people to start the spreading effect. The other important thing is to make your early audience there’s something big and worth sharing. And by sharing I mean that they have to understand the info/ content they have create value to them only if shared. Which may be kind of complicated.
Now you’ve been through all this, here’s a list of some best-in-class viral videos. Their success is based on simple and deep feelings, which are big vectors of sharing since consumers like to share feelings. Click here to go on my list of viral videos on Youtube.
Image Credit: Hugh MacLeod from GapingVoid
