Viral campaigns not working
MediaPost reports on a Jupiter Research report. You have to pay to read the report, but reading the summary, I’m not surprised at the conclusions, that only 15% achieved the goal of getting customers to promote the brand message. Whilst older audiences tend to use more email, younger ones use SN sites:
Social networking sites have definite pitfalls associated with them, explained David Schatsky, president, JupiterResearch. “While these sites may appear to be the most effective manner of delivering a message regardless of brand appropriateness,” he said, “by failing to truly understand the audience, viral marketers stand to alienate as many consumers as they interest.”
One of the tactics that is assessed as failing is sending stuff to influencers. The problem is, for many things, the influencers are the same, so getting something on their radar, without a media buy, can be difficult. Perez Hilton gets bandied around there as someone to send content to far more times than I care to think about. Understanding your micro-demos and how they work in the tools available leads to far more effective distribution. But the most important thing – get the idea right, Create something that people want to talk about and that relates to your brand. Without that, it does not matter how much time and effort you spend on distribution, the content will flop.
Interesting. Its hard to find info on the success of viral marketing on the web. Id be curious to know if there are any larger ones that HAVE worked. As i understand it the cadburys wispa bar campaign was a viral one? Not sure if im correct on that and if so no idea who did it – it certainly had a few of the associated hallmarks..
15% do work – those are the ones that really get their audience and, I would guess, are doing the campaign for the audience instead of the common call of ‘we must do a viral’. One i see that does a lot of good stuff is Mini – not a ‘big’ video but lots of stuff, all on premise, that drive users to the web with little direct advertising. They spread via WOM.
Sorry rachel – what do you mean by Mini? Do you mean the car or am i missing something else here? :)
Here’s a couple of the recent Mini stuff:
http://www.theotherlunchbreak.co.uk/
http://www.theotherview.co.uk/
Mini do a lot of cool sites that tend to get spread virally instead of a big push. Here I’m using the term to define something that gets spread because it is cool, because it gives the person with the information a coolness factor that they know something and they spread it around, not necessarily the big, OTT millions-watched video.
Here Mini know their audience (a little quirky) and design content for them which then gets shared