Archive for the ‘Viral Marketing’ Category

  • Feb 08
  • 22

The Rise of Social Media Marketing

DinosaurI’ll be honest, it has been a while since I studied dinosaurs. But if memory serves, they pretty much ruled the world for about 160 million years. Seriously, for a good long time it was not that great being a mammal. Then, about 65 million years ago, something happened and almost all dinosaurs and a boatload of other animals became extinct. This event is referred to as the “Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event.” (At this point you can either be impressed with my paleontological knowledge or realize that I just looked up the term on Wikipedia.)

Theories differ as to what caused the event, but it’s clear that one really good thing came out of it: us. When all the big things died, it gave all the little things a much needed chance to get a foothold and start their own journey towards world domination. So what does this have to do with social media marketing? Everything.

The forms of “new media” and “new media marketing” with which this blog concerns itself are still exactly that: new. The vast majority of marketing and advertising dollars is still spent on mainstream, mass-media marketing. Even online marketing spending is still heavily weighted towards pay-per click, in-stream, and other traditional marketing methods shoved carelessly onto the digital world. “New media marketing,” is a small mammal in a world still run by dinosaurs. But that’s changing. We can see it happening all around us, and the topic has been discussed on this blog and others before. I write today specifically because I found two separate reports which, while not the harbinger of the traditional marketing apocalypse, certainly signal a shift in power that is already taking place.

Let’s begin with traditional off-line advertising:

In the results of an Association of National Advertisers and Forrester Research study released today:

  • 62% of marketers say traditional television advertising has become less effective in the past two years.
  • More than 50% of advertisers said that when half of all TV households use DVRs, they will cut spending on TV advertising by 12%.
  • 87% of respondents said they intend to spend more ad dollars on the Internet this year.

These stats are amazing. Over 60% of marketers are now admitting what we have all been feeling for some time: TV commercials just aren’t working like they used to. If half the advertisers say they will cut TV ad spending by 12% when DVR penetration reaches half of all households, then that’s somewhere upwards of 4 billion advertising dollars that will be looking for a new home. Couple that with the number of marketers who will be spending more ad dollars on the internet this year, and it becomes clear where those homeless billions are going to go when the time comes.

Now let’s look at online advertising.

This is the part where traditional online advertisers say, “Hey, what makes you think any of that money is going to be spent on new media campaigns?” It’s true that pay-per-click style advertising is still the largest subset of the online marketing industry. But, I would claim that these PPCers and pre-rollers and post-rollers are just as susceptible to the coming extinction as the dinosaurs of traditional marketing. All these PPC banner ads and rich media ads are simply the digital incarnation of the traditional marketing models of interruption and top-down thinking. I think people make the wrong distinction when they think that traditional marketing will die while internet marketing will thrive. That is drawing the line in the wrong place. It is traditional marketing models that will die, and new models that will thrive. A rich-media in-stream ad before an online video is not “new media marketing” simply because it is attached to online video. It’s still an interrupting nuisance that just shouts a message at me rather than conversing with me.

It is not just theoretical or ideological problems that these PPC marketing strategies must face, however. There are hard numbers that show one inherent problem with such marketing. That problem is click fraud, and ClickForensics has some new data out showing an increase in the already woefully-high click fraud numbers.

ClickForensics Graphs

Look at these stats taken directly from the report:

  • The overall industry average click fraud rate rose to 16.6 percent for Q4 2007. That’s up from the 14.2 percent click fraud rate for the same quarter in 2006 and 16.2 percent for Q3 2007.
  • The average click fraud rate of PPC advertisements appearing on search engine content networks, including Google AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network, was 28.3 percent in Q4 2007. That’s up from the 19.2 percent average click fraud rate for the same quarter in 2006 and 28.1 percent for Q3 2007.
  • The 2007 industry average click fraud rate grew by 15 percent over the industry average click fraud rate for 2006.

I think click fraud is just the precursor to larger problems that will plague these forms of interruption-based online advertising over the coming years. The more I read, the more I study, and the more work I do with social and viral marketing, the more I deepen my conviction that the approach to marketing must change in order to reach consumers. You can no longer demand their attention, you must earn it. And if you have to earn their attention, then you have to engage them more than most marketers are used to. Marketing is becoming a conversation, not a sermon, and the rise of social media marketing is upon us.

For more on this topic, make sure to subscribe to our feed. Next week I will be publishing a follow up post entitled “The Rule of Reciprocity” that will discuss the importance of the “conversation” that must start taking place in order for marketers to continue to engage consumers.

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4 Comments
  • Feb 08
  • 21

Reviews #1: Tide’s “My Talking Stain”

Abstract:

Introduced with a Super Bowl commercial, Tide’s newest social media effort takes the form of a destination website. The site, located at www.mytalkingstain.com, not only hosts the original commercial, but also provides visitors with the ability to create a customized stain and commercial.Tide Comp Score

The Scores:

  1. Value to Consumer: 65
  2. Engagement: 88
  3. Creativity: 73
  4. Ease of Use: 83
  5. Viralness: 87
  6. Forwards: 4

Category Drill-Down:

Value to Consumer: Anyone playing around on this site for more than three minutes will realize that the main value added to the consumer is entertainment value. Having spent 30 minutes on the site myself, I must say it is definitely more entertaining than I expected. Uploading my photo, recording my voice and sending the absurd result to a friend actually is fun. While, in the end, I learned nothing about life, love or even Tide, there was definitely entertainment value to be had.
Value to Consumer Score: 65

Engagement: Interestingly, My Talking Stain offers many levels of engagement. If you want to upload a photo and watch the commercial, you can do that for a quick bit of fun. If you want to record your voice, send the commercial to your friends and enter to win some prizes, you can. If you want to make your own talking stain vid, you can do that too. Simply choose your level and rock out. This is a great feature as many people aren’t interested in playing with all aspects of the site to write an accurate post about it. Some people only want to play a little bit and Tide clearly considered this. The brand is present, but not offensively so. The addition of My Talking Stain branded content for ringtones, MP3s and buddy icons allows Tide to engage consumers where the consumers choose to live rather than demanding the consumers come to them. This shows a nice understanding of the social media space.
Engagement Score: 88

Creativity: The idea of the talking stain is definitely amusing. Building a social media experience utilizing a pre-made commercial, a destination site, customizable sounds and faces is a great way to expand upon the commercial. However, the customization of the talking stain is basically one small technological step above Elf Yourself and could have been better.
Creativity Score: 73

Tide Pen

Ease of Use: The site is very easy to navigate; your options are clearly defined upfront by the stains on the shirt. The site is very well made and it’s very easy to make yourself a spoof video. Calling in to record your voice does require having a phone around, but that isn’t too much to expect these days is it? I wish they streamlined the “get famous” section of the site more, but the “spoof toolkit” is a big step above the “make one and post it online” that I was expecting. I’d bet 99.999% of people visiting don’t even seriously consider making a video but every .001% convinced to engage further with your brand via making a video is a huge win. This is especially true when applied to the very large numbers of people aware of the site due to Superbowl exposure.
Ease of Use Score: 83

Viralness: The site provides various opportunities for sharing and spreading the video online. While the medium is inherently not as viral as a video, they’ve offset this by prompting people to create their own videos and by facilitating a quick upload to Youtube. I was prompted multiple times to share, all in non-offensive ways. I was pleasantly surprised that they included, prominently, an embed option for your custom-made commercial; most companies would overlook this move. The lack of social news/bookmarking sites (think digg/del.icio.us/etc) was the only big mistake I saw.
Viralness Score: 87

Conclusion:

From the composite score (80) we can determine that Tide’s ‘My Talking Stain’ website provides a very solid forum for users to engage their brand. While some areas could definitely be improved slightly, no one area carried the marketing effort. The combination of usability, viralness and the utilization of multiple consumer engagement points allows this social media marketing campaign to promote the brand very well.

BONUS: the video I made

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7 Comments
  • Feb 08
  • 20

PandemicBlog Introduces the “Reviews Series” for Social Media Campaigns

ApprovedAt Pandemic Blog, we try to provide quality content to people looking to learn more about viral and social media marketing. To further this goal, we’re starting our ‘Reviews’ series of blog posts. In this series, we will review online marketing efforts from successful businesses, summarize their key features and assign scores in six categories. From these categories, we will arrive at a final Composite Score. This will result in a relatively standardized rating system that can then be used to accurately compare different online marketing efforts. The end goal, as always, is to further valuable discussion and to gain insight to viral and social media as they come into being, progress, succeed or fail.

The scores will be presented as follows:

  1. Value to Consumer: 1-100
  2. Engagement: 1-100
  3. Viralness: 1-100
  4. Ease of Use: 1-100
  5. Creativity: 1-100
  6. Forwards: 0-Infinite

Composite Score: Calculated by adding the scores of sections 1-6 and dividing by 5.

Category explanations:

Value to Consumer: This category represents our belief that a successful viral or social media marketing efforts should bring actual value to the consumers that experience them. This value, as I’m defining it, is pretty open and can be anything from entertainment and interesting discussions, to information and helpful resources. Since an online consumer is not captive to the marketer in any way, the marketing effort needs to bring real value to the consumer’s life if the marketing effort has any hope of being watched, engaged with or passed along. This category’s score ranges from 1-100 (100 being the best possible score).

Engagement: This category represents the ability of the marketing piece to engage the consumer with the brand. More than just “time spent on site”, this metric takes into account how much the consumer actually gets to “play” with the brand behind the marketing effort. A video can be very engaging, but destination sites, games, and blogs have even more potential for drawing the users into the “world” of the brand. Campaigns that combine multiple “new media” elements can be more engaging still. This category’s score ranges from 1-100.

Viralness: This category measures the ease by which someone can share the marketing effort with their network and any incentives that they have to do so. Are consumers prompted to share the marketing piece via social networks, email or embed tags? Is it even possible for them to do so? An important factor when discussing the ROI of an online marketing effort will be the ability of the effort to disperse easily on its own and reach a significant number of consumers. This category’s score ranges from 1-100.

Ease of Use: This category represents the ease of use or user-friendliness of the marketing piece. Can people see/play/download/upload/etc what is necessary to make this piece engaging in a quick and effortless way? Marketing efforts that are too involved and require much work on the part of the consumer will not spread optimally. The more time or tech savvy required to successfully experience the marketing message, the smaller the group of consumers using it will be. This category’s score ranges from 1-100.

Creativity: This category is relatively self explanatory. Something has to earn the consumer’s attention and the more interesting and different the marketing effort, the more easily that attention can be earned. This category’s score ranges from 1-100.

Forwards: This is a more concrete, “the proof is in the pudding”, category that simply reports the number of times I, personally, forwarded the marketing piece before sitting down to write a blog post about it. I figured, rather than trying to come up with a more subjective measure, why not simply record the number of times I ACTUALLY forward the piece and weight that number significantly less in the overall calculation. This category, barely affecting the Composite Score, almost amounts to a “bonus” category and can only shade the final score slightly in one direction or another. This category’s score range begins at zero and could theoretically be as large as the amount of connections I have in my network at any given time.

Composite Score: This number represents the overall assigned score to the marketing effort as a whole. With the first five categories equally weighted and the final category (Forwards) weighted significantly less, the composite score provides an easy way to compare otherwise disparate marketing campaigns. The range of the composite score is theoretically infinite, but the score of the campaign should be considered as if it were on a 1-100 scale.

Our Reviews series will hopefully provide a platform for discussion about actual viral and social media efforts that are currently online. Acting as a bare-bones case study, our readers will be able to see not only how each marketing effort stacks up against other efforts, but also what factors go into creating a successful viral and social media campaign. After reviewing multiple campaigns, important trends, strategies and techniques will be discussed.

As always, email us directly or comment if you have questions, improvements or social media marketing campaigns that you’d like to see reviewed.

1 Comment
  • Feb 08
  • 13

How Does Viral Marketing Work?

Um, it happens when people watch videos on YouTube, right?

Close.Blue Guys in a Tree

Viral Marketing is quite the buzzword right now, but I am surprised how many people I talk to misunderstand the basics of how the process works. The concepts that YouTube is the sole repository of viral videos, or that “it’s all about” being someone’s friend on Facebook are unfortunately common. It is very easy for plugged-in social media experts to forget that there are a bunch of people for whom viral marketing is still a completely foreign concept. It is with this in mind that I have co-authored a short document called “How Does Viral Marketing Work?”

There are a couple important things to know about the document:

  1. It is an introduction to viral marketing, the first in a series that will get increasingly detailed and insightful.
  2. It is not a case study. For people who already understand the role of word-mouth-on the internet and want to read more about the science of the viral effect, you should tackle all 46 pages of “The Dynamics of Viral Marketing” (an excellent study of the effect of referrals.)
  3. It was created to encourage understanding and discussion of viral marketing, not to talk about services.

By now, I’m sure you’ve already clicked over to the PDF and are joyfully reading about the mechanics of the viral spread. Even for people who think they are already experts, a brush up on the nuts and bolts might not be such a bad thing. Marketers have said to me that sometimes, in the frenzy to create something new and great for a client, they lose site of the fundamentals of the medium. That is: word-of-mouth marketing amplified by the power of the web.

The internet has given word-of-mouth marketing something it desperately needed: scale.”

Blue BloggerIn the discussion of how the web has made word-of-mouth mechanics into a truly viable form of marketing, I also discuss the concept of the “super-participant.” A super-participant is someone like my little blue friend to the left. Super-participants make viral marketing work. Bloggers, popular YouTube users, Social news/bookmarking power-users, they are all super-participants. “…on the internet there are tens on millions of potential super-participants. The web is a fully democratic medium and the constant micro-segmentation of interests and ideas allows for almost anyone to be the “mass media” of their microcosm.”

Again, you can read the full document here. This report is the first in a series which will discuss topics such as:

  1. The Differences Between Viral Marketing and Traditional Marketing
  2. How Not To Use Viral Marketing
  3. The Power of an Engaged Consumer

Make sure to stay connected with us by subscribing to our RSS feed. You’ll get our reports as they become available and all our great blog posts in between. We want to build a destination for unbiased, insightful information of the viral and social media marketing world and we welcome your voice.

15 Comments
  • Jan 08
  • 15

Viral Marketing Terminology: An Embarrassment of Riches

Over the past two months Pandemic Labs co-founders, Matthew Peters and Brennan White, have been privileged to be interviewed for a number of stories on viral and social media marketing. In the process we noticed an interesting pattern: the first question in every interview was always the same! In five interviews with journalists from publications ranging from niche trade magazines, to business school reviews, to national newspapers everyone seemed to have the same question on their minds. Of course the questions were phrased differently each time, but it went something like this:

Journalist:

So I’ve been conducting a lot of initial research on my own and I have to say it seems like there are a lot of names floating around out there. Originally I knew the term viral marketing, but now I see there’s word of mouth, buzz, and social media, and social network…honestly, I’ve got to say, I’m a little confused. What are all these terms? Are they all different? What’s the difference? Why…..etc…….”

This was the first question from five separate journalists! That’s either an extraordinary coincidence or it’s representative of a key point of confusion in the industry. Notice that it is not simply that each journalist asked for clarification at some point in the interview, rather it was the first thing they wanted to talk about. This pattern led us to search the internet as the journalists might have. What sources are out there defining and comparing the various genres and sub-genres of marketing taking place in the Wild West of online marketing? The answer: not many. Wikipedia is showing a solid effort at defining various forms of marketing, but the interconnectivity and overlap of many forms is not adequately defined. In our opinion, there are too many terms trying to reference the same thing. Let’s look at a list of types of web-based marketing terms that are floating around the net:

  • viral marketing
  • social marketing
  • social media marketing
  • social network marketing
  • blog marketing
  • content marketing
  • word of mouth marketing
  • buzz marketing
  • guerrilla marketing (sometimes used to describe more clandestine attempts at controlling buzz)

Those nine terms are just what we could come up with off the top of our heads! Each term is trying to be slightly more descriptive than others about its particular method. But we’re splitting hairs here. Most of the time these terms are used synonymously. This not only creates confusion within the industry, but also confuses potential clients (and journalists apparently).

Now, we are not so arrogant as to think we can present a solution here and watch as it is universally adopted as standard nomenclature. As is the case with language, standardization happens as a matter of course rather than a matter of will. However, for our own sanity and for the sake of those who might be confused about the terms, we are going to present two representations that we feel accurately describe the way these terms are really being used.

 

WOM umbrella

 

This is one way to look at things (and probably a way that WOMMA would like!) At their core, all of the marketing types we are discussing are based on the age-old idea of word of mouth. The difference is that now with the internet, everyone has a greater ability to spread a message and certain people—in the form of blogs, videos, etc—have “mega-mouths.” They can “talk” once and thousands of people will “hear.” The depiction above shows that each type of marketing simply uses a slightly different tool set to achieve word of mouth spread.

Now we would like to present you with another way to look at things. It is not completely different, but it more accurately depicts our viewpoint and the way we have found success in describing new marketing possibilities to clients.

Toolbox

We see these forms of marketing not as overlapping genres competing against each other but as tools in the Social Media Marketing toolbox. Social media encompasses all forms of web-based media where the community can organize and contribute. Media sharing sites, forums, social networks, online games, blogs and virtual worlds are all forms of social media. The specifics of how to use each type of social media for marketing purposes may differ, but they are still part of the social media toolbox. Content marketing is not different from social media marketing; it is a type of social media marketing. Using forums to generate word of mouth interest in a product is not its own separate industry but a social media tool.

Again, we stress that this is merely our view of the ever-changing internet marketing landscape. We are interested in other peoples’ views on the subject. We are calling on our readers and other bloggers to help pin down the relationship between all these wandering terms. As we said above, there is no right answer yet, merely room to help distill and define terminology and relationships for easier consumption. We would feel privileged if others would join the discussion.

6 Comments
  • Jan 08
  • 8

Does Viral Marketing Work?

T-shirt

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  • Dec 07
  • 6

The Uses of Bad Press in a Long Tail World

My New Understanding of an Old Adage

Recently, Viral Marketing has seen some bad press. From the Jupiter Research report to the LA Times’ recent lambasting of Dan Ackerman Greenberg’s ‘‘ article, bad press seems to be an inevitable companion to this nascent marketing style. I have been ruminating on and reading reactions to Greenberg’s post since the original article on November 22 and concluded that, even though I disagree with some of his ethical decisions, my assessment of Greenberg’s post is less critical than most.

I would like to say that the reactions to Greenberg’s post were spread evenly across a wide spectrum of opinion. If I did say that however, I’d be an outright liar and the only purpose of my lie would be to set this post squarely in the middle of said spectrum. That would be a nice confirmation of my sanity and perspective, wouldn’t it? Even though about 400 of the 469 comments on his article were very negative, including one particularly harsh comment from TechCrunch Editor Michael Arrington, I’m going to go out on a limb and praise Greenberg for his efforts. Now before you unsubscribe, stop reading and otherwise write this post off completely, hear me out. I promise I won’t argue that he’s a good person.

Let me just say that even in my experience tracking successful viral campaigns, I’ve never seen anything permeate the online community faster than negative news. More specifically, I’ve noticed that news travels particularly fast when it’s perceived by the tech community as a direct threat to free-will and the transparency of online information. Regardless of the “don’t feed the trolls” meme that probably should have been the thrust of most of the comments on Greenberg’s article, I think Greenberg is sitting high and dry behind his one-page “corporate website” with a huge grin. Regrettably, I’m willing to bet it’s the kind of grin you only wear on those rare occasions where your most vocal enemies unknowingly fuel your success.

Hopefully I’m way off-base, but due to the robustness of his suggestions and the lack of content on his information-gathering website, I would bet the farm that Greenberg not only expected this reaction, but that he crafted, courted and planned for it. Moreover, and here’s the point of the whole post so tune in, I believe GreThe Long Tailenberg read “The Long Tail” and executed Chris Anderson’s secondary lessons therein to perfection to drive his business.

For those of you who haven’t read or aren’t familiar with the lessons in The Long Tail, please read the following four sentence book report: The old ideas regarding the size of a viable market are wrong now that the internet has changed the cost of accessing markets in general. Now it’s possible, and in many cases advisable, to sell to many micro-markets in aggregate that, in a brick-in-mortar world, wouldn’t have been accessible en mass but, thanks to the internet, now are. Secondarily, utilizing the vast reach of the internet to magnify one, previously minuscule, target market large enough to support your business, can be a successful tactic. Also, Amazon was a visionary and overall solid business idea.

To cut this rambling post to a very fine point: Greenberg harnessed the predictable online reaction to his viable (if arguably unethical) viral marketing strategies article as a way to instantly market his services directly to the executives who think this kind of success-at-all-costs marketing is a desirable quality. In short, in 2,400 words or less and zero capital investment, Greenberg spoke directly to his key buyers who, thanks to the immensity of the internet, probably number in the hundreds or thousands. I wouldn’t be surprised if the kid increases his company’s revenue tenfold by the end of the year from this one article (how much revenue would you expect a web-based company with no real website to have anyway?). If my predictions regarding his success are true, I’d be hard pressed to think of a more efficient use of marketing dollars in the past year.

While I disagree with some of the individual suggestions, my hat is off to the high-level strategy that Greenberg crafted and executed. It’s not too often that you can promote your business so effectively and make the general internet community look sheepishly naive at the same time. That said, I think this whole escapade and ‘The Long Tail’ provide a useful lesson that many marketers (including some of my colleagues) will refuse to learn due to their desire to be seen as nice (notice I didn’t write “desire to be nice”). The fact of the matter is, bad press creates a unique and powerful level of buzz and, if applied correctly, can be a fantastic marketing tool. It would seem to me that with appropriate viral campaign planning and a library card, the old adage can still hold true and bad press can simultaneously be great press.

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