A few thoughts on 'Viral Marketing'

17-year old Joshua Beattie from Brisbane, Australia, makes a 7-minute shortfilm on a zero dollar budget. The actors: his friends. The cameraman: too. Equipment: a video camera and a laptop. He puts the film on Youtube, and generates almost a million views in one week. No marketing dollar spent. No 'Below-the-line' campaign. No PR agency paying bloggers to 'spread the word'. None of that nonsense. Just a really good story. Well told. Perfectly executed. His story is everywhere these days.

When a journalist asks him if he intended to spread the word through social networks, he shakes his head. No, he simply sent a link to a few friends who missed the screening at the local high-school. People simply forwarded it to friends, who forwarded it to friends, who forwarded it to friends.

In the old days, this was called 'Word of Mouth', the passing of information from one person to another. Somehow this concept got twisted, abstracted, and then misunderstood by ignorant marketing managers and advertising specialists, who called it 'Viral Marketing'.

There is something fundamentally wrong with this concept. While 'Word of Mouth' is an outcome, 'Viral Marketing' is most often misunderstood as a marketing strategy. Who doesn't understand the difference is almost doomed to fail when pumping hundreds of thousands of dollars into a 'viral campaign'. Very rarely does this approach succeed, because you simply cannot force your friends to forward a link. If they think it's crap, they simply delete it. If the content is really outstanding - as in the above video - we forward it to five, ten or even twenty friends. After all, what we forward, reflects back on us. And who wants to build a reputation for sending lame links around?

What most marketing managers don't understand is that 'Viral' is an outcome, not a strategy. A few campaigns have succeeded, either because they were first, and no one else had done it before. Remember 'The Blair Witch Project'? That was a viral success story. Remember the roller-skating babies for Evian? A viral hit. Remember 'Fantastic Freddy' for Radisson Hotels? Chances are, you've never heard of him. He was planned to be part of a viral campaign. Look him up on YouTube and judge for yourself.

Fact is, these days you've pretty much failed if your viral video does not generate at least a 100,000 views in a week. Looking at the Top 10 hits of viral marketing per week, you need to even crack the 500,000 view mark to be mentioned anywhere.

So think twice before doing something 'viral'. Do you have a good story? Do you have a great execution? Would you yourself send this link to ten of your best friends, and ten of your top business contacts?

Related links:
The Top 10 Viral Video Ads of the Week
10 Memorable Viral Videos of 2010