Marketing to a generation that doesn’t follow orders, hates ads and throws a wrench in your strategy.

Read Write Web recently fielded a great article that caused interesting debate within our viral marketing company, and I thought it would be worth sharing. The article focused on how Generation Y (born between 1982-1997) is going to “change the web” and what makes a Gen Y-er different from the previous generations. Some of the notable (debatable?) facts about Gen Y when viewed from a social media marketing perspective:

1. TV Isn’t King
2. They Don’t Care About Your Ad, They Care What Their Friends Think
3. Marketing Has to Change

I agree so strongly with these three notes in particular that I formed this business based on them! But the discussion that followed the article brought up some points that I thought worth getting blogosphere feedback on.

1. If TV isn’t king what is? Stats show that TV quality content is still extremely popular (might we say king?) online. If this isn’t King, what does something need to do to be ‘King’? My main feeling is that TV as a medium is dying due to one main factor: Interruption marketing. What is the first thing a DVR/TiVo owner does? Skip all commercials. One of my colleagues asked “why?” when this point was brought up. I think the better question is “now that the possibility for freedom is there, why does anyone EVER WATCH TV commercials?”
2. Gen-Y (and many older folks) are supposedly of the opinion that “your ad doesn’t matter”. I would have further refined this point to be “your poorly-targeted, uninteresting ad doesn’t matter”. Look at the viral success of some interesting, funny or amazing online ads. Are they THAT hard to understand? Are they random, unrepeatable anomalies? I say no. They all engage the consumer in a way that the consumer WANTS to be engaged. Putting a TV commercial online and then complaining that viral marketing is failing is like putting a Mustang in the ocean and telling Ford their cars don’t work! I think ReadWriteWeb had it slightly wrong. Gen Y-ers like relevant, engaging ads. They watch the Superbowl for the ads, they forward amazing online ads. Gen Y is responsible for the huge success of some viral campaigns. It’s the overwhelming failure on the part of the ads to understand the medium and earn attention that Gen-Y disagrees with, not advertising in general.
3. “Marketing has to change” is about as timely and insightful an observation as someone showing up to the D-day beaches on June 10th, 1944 and proclaiming “something big just went down”. Maybe they were being “simple” for simplicity’s sake, but think comments like that reassure marketers in a terrible way. With that comment, we’re askin g people to ignore and delay the inevitable. “It’s OK, other people who ‘get it’ are just beginning to understand this new wave of marketing. I can spend five more years of marketing budget before I turn my brain on.” So much content is available online now (print, radio AND Television content) that advertisers who aren’t wising up don’t have much more time as the space is rapidly being conquered by the forward thinking outfits who are willing to “brave” the lands where consumers are in control of what they spend their time on.

I would say I think very much like a Gen Y-er. I can’t stand being interrupted online and I hate irrelevant ads, but I LOVE good viral videos and I love targeted ads. I realize that TV isn’t king anymore (or more specifically, for much longer). I realize that in an increasingly on-demand world, marketers can’t demand attention of Gen Y, they can only earn it.

If you’re a marketer seeking Generation Y’s dollars, ask yourself if you’ve honestly considered the changing landscape and changed your actions accordingly. It’s like they say, repeating the same action over and over again and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. How will you change your approach today to win Gen Y dollars tomorrow?

Most of you know that this blog is edited and maintained by the founders of the viral marketing company, Pandemic Labs. It has been our goal from the very beginning to create an online destination to provide insight, information, and discussion about viral marketing and social media marketing. It has occurred to me lately that much of our ongoing experiences with clients give us some unique insights that we can share with the community here. To that end, this is the first post in an ongoing series talking about some secrets of viral marketing.

Today’s post comes straight from our most recent viral video. For any who are interested, you can check the video out here. This video is for our client who is holding a contest for the best user-generated commercials. The video (along with our other efforts) is targeting people who have the ability and desire to create and upload their own commercials. The video has been up for just over two weeks and has already received over 1.5 millions views, made the front page of Digg and the front page of Break. We have been very pleased with the results. However, as we were tracking the spread of the video, we noticed something interesting.

As you can see from the screen capture here, this particular seed of the video on YouTube has received a ton of views from Poland (every link in the above screen capture is a Polish site). Now, the contest we are promoting is only open to residents of the U.S., so our first reaction might have been frustration that our video was viraling around another country. Some might wonder what good it is for our video to be one of the top videos in Poland. But, situations like this should be treated as a welcome surprise. Here’s why:

1. The internet has no borders…so trying to force borders will just make you angry.
2. Views are views. For instance, this seed received the vast majority of it’s views from Poland, but its quickly rising view count gave us a good story with which to approach American bloggers about our video which was obviously really popular. This led to an easier time getting American bloggers to feature the video and thus helped us get the video in front of more of our target demographic.
3. It’s a two way street. Just as our english video gained a lot of traction in Poland, so too can popular things in other countries gain traction here. In this case, we know of two American video game blogs that featured the video after they had found it on Wykop.

Looking forward we can also hypothesize about some possible viral marketing tactics to use in the future. Basically, if there are Digg-like sites around the world that have the potential to drive lots of views to a video, and are easier to get onto the front page, then a smart viral marketer could leverage otherwise useless popularity in other countries to pump up the video view count and help the video make it to the Most Viewed page here on the good ol’ U.S. YouTube.

In conclusion, make sure that you don’t get mad if your efforts gain steam in areas of the world that you don’t really need. There are always benefits to more views and more popularity and the smart viral marketer can see these new benefits and use them to their fullest potential.

We work very hard with our clients to determine not only if viral marketing is the right social media strategy for them, but also to determine which form their viral marketing campaign should take. The internet is fluid and there are various forms of media within it with the potential for viral spread. In speaking with a client the other day about ideas for a new campaign, it occurred to me that in some ways it is easier to describe what viral marketing is not rather than what it is. Indeed, people like neat orderly lists that clearly—albeit incorrectly—assign boundaries to otherwise amorphous concepts. Perhaps in the near future I will write a nice neat list of the many ways one could implement viral marketing, but right now I am more interested in discussing how not to do it. Certainly, knowing what a thing is not will help us to know more clearly what it is.

Viral Marketing Is Not:

1. Butterfly Marketing: I was aghast when, reading through some marketing forums, I found a user claiming that the only “real” form of viral marketing was butterfly marketing as presented by Mike Filsaime. What’s worse, there were other users agreeing. I vehemently disagree with this statement. I don’t know how Butterfly Marketing works, but I can tell you for sure that there are numerous examples of successful viral marketing campaigns for companies like BMW, Trojan, Office Depot, and Coke that have absolutely nothing to do with a $1,497 program that can earn you “$60,341 in 7 days.” Butterfly marketing is not viral marketing. I am not sure I even want to dignify this scam with further comments.

2. Repurposing Content: Creating a TV commercial and then putting it on YouTube when it has finished its run is not viral marketing. One of the biggest causes of failure in early viral marketing campaigns was the belief that a funny commercial would automatically viral around the internet. This is clearly not the case. There is now research and data showing the differences of viewing habits online when compared to TV. Marketing content that was originally created for success on television rarely meets with such success online. Coincidently, successful online content would likely fail miserably on television. In marketing, successful viral media must be created with the internet in mind just as successful TV commercials must be created with television in mind.

3. Bribing Consumers: I fully expect to meet with some resistance on this point and I suppose I will just have to learn to live with the knowledge that some people don’t agree with me. The source of disagreement on this point stems primarily from the fact that I am not claiming this method is “not viral marketing,” but that it is “not the right kind of viral marketing.” Offering existing customers incentives to get their friends to sign up may, in fact, encourage person-to-person to spread. But, I maintain that this practice results in a sort of “one-off” viralness, sacrificing quality of engagement for quantity of new customers gained. For instance, a user of PartyPoker.com may take advantage of the $20 he gets for every one of his friends he convinces to join, but this method appeals to him only financially. I worry that a company-customer relationship built solely on mutual financial gain is fleeting and inherently weaker than a relationship built on trust, loyalty, and engagement. Again, I stress that this is a legitimate marketing tactic which can achieve results. I warn only against the belief that it is the only form of viral marketing that works.

4. Adding Share Buttons: On this blog, we use the ShareThis plugin to allow readers to more easily share our content on their favorite social sites. There are other ways to do the same thing: FeedFlare, Sociable, or just adding the site-provided buttons of your favorite places. Creating ease of shareability is crucial to the viral spread of many pieces of online media. That being said, putting share buttons on traditional sales documents or web pages will not make them viral…in fact, it will not even help. Yesterday I found the website of a social media optimization company which will here remain nameless. That company had sociable-style buttons for Digg, Stumble, Del.icio.us and a few others on every page of their site. Their “About Us” page was two paragraphs of dense copy that read like a web 1.0 sales brochure and sung the praises of the company in every possible way. But wait! What’s that? Oh, I have the chance to share this page with my friends on Digg…great! It was even possible for me to Stumble their contact page. This is absurd. People share content and it is unlikely that your corporate history page is worthy of sharing in the way that DoshDosh’s new blog post is. Furthermore, in the case of services like Digg, the button is virtually useless after 24 hours following the first Digg. Once that mark is passed you won’t get on the front page and you are not going to get any real traffic from Digg. I have seen similar instances of adding share buttons to things are just not going to be shared. Sure, Stumble might send each of your pages some traffic, but you could achieve that without placing a Stumble button right there on top of each one. There is a lot of great content out there so “shareable” content often needs to be written with that goal in mind. Adding buttons to things willy-nilly will not make them viral.

This is clearly not a comprehensive list of all the things which are not viral marketing. Who knows, there might even be some people who disagree with me and think that putting a Digg button on your site is all you need to market virally. As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I think this list almost requires a companion list of some examples of what viral marketing is. I will tackle this next week and hopefully we can start a discussion of the forms of viral marketing and share some more examples of things which are labeled “viral marketing” but really aren’t.