Social Media Viral Marketing Success – Not as Easy as Catching Virus

The recent song “Kolavari Di” is a great example of how something can be a hit through viral effect through social media. 1.4M YouTube views in 3 days - definitely a huge success which has made lot of people to take notice of this. While I was reading the numerous articles written on this song (with various perspective), I was thinking about what can make a campaign to go viral. With social media, it has become relatively easy to create a viral campaign because of the mere fact that people are already on Internet, ready to consume information and very eager to share it too.

Of course there is no thumb rule for this or there is nothing which can ‘guarantee’ a viral impact on social media. Yes, there are some basic factors which are ‘required’ for a viral campaign. Viral campaigns, on social media or otherwise, need a great detail of planning and flawless execution. While the platforms are free, lot of creativity and imagination is required.

When we talk about the basic factors, some things which come to my mind are:

#1 Emotional Connect: I have observed that many of such campaigns have a very strong emotional connect. Consider Airtel’s campaign of ‘Har Ek Friend Jaroori Hota Hai'. It has a very strong emotional connect for the youth (friends and friendship). Vodafone Zoo Zoo ads made a wonderful watch during Cricket season with everyday situations being shown very cutely.

#2 Incentivized Share or Pass Along: All the viral campaigns make it extremely easy to share or pass along and are incentivized for sharing. Sometimes the incentives are in the form of rewords, free gifts and many a times, the incentives are in the form of ‘style statements’, ‘I know this’, ‘I am the first one telling you about this’, ‘I started this’.

#3 Well-spread Awareness: The campaign can go viral only when at least the initial group of people hear about it and decide to spread it. So it is extremely important to spread the awareness of the campaign.  These could be through paid, planned or sometimes unpaid/ unplanned medias. Anythingforjetta was a very successful Twitter campaign run by Volkswagen which was beautifully spread with the use of traditional newspaper media (very much planned). ‘Kolavari di’ was talked about by celebrities like Amitabh Bachchan on Twitter (apparently not necessarily planned!). Hotmail is a another example where the information was passed on beautifully through a message ‘Get your free email at Hotmail’ at the end of every email message.

#4 Extremely Easy to Understand and More Importantly, Easier to Transmit: A message cannot be passed along unless it is easy to consume and even easier to transmit. It has to be super light. Remember the Macintosh campaign - “The computer for rest of us”? Very easy to understand, causally speak about and pass along without sounding unknowledgeable about it.

Again, there is never a guarantee that a campaign WILL go viral. So do cautiously evaluate someone who claims to offer you guaranteed result with viral campaigns. And definitely do not think of viral campaigns using the same old marketing rules. These are not about “How much you spend on marketing” and “to how many people you beg to for covering your news”. These are about telling stories and forming a connection with the audience. – and then letting them spread your story.

Building Pre-Launch Buzz – Mix of Creativity, Diligence and Focus

While launching a new product, many miss out on pre-launch buzz, that is creating buzz about the product and making people interested in it even before the product is launched. The concept of pre-launch buzz is not new. Film industry has been using it for many years.  The purpose of pre-launch buzz is to create desire, need and excitement for the product in the market. With this, when the product becomes available, it starts selling like hot cake.

The best way to use the pre-launch phase is to warm up the market, your prospects, your customers. Use this time to engage with the market, look for feedback, ask questions, address objections, conduct surveys and answer questions.

I believe that for the pre-launch buzz to be successful, it needs to have a right mix of creativity, diligence and focus.

Creativity: Pre-launch buzz creation definitely requires a lot of creativity. Rather than going by the regularly mentioned things like putting up a teaser, offering a whitepaper etc, you need to identify what will appeal to your audience, what will excite them and what will make them talking about your product/ service? Of course, this requires a thorough understanding of your market, research of your target group, your competition (if any), detailed understanding of the problem you are trying to solve and so on.

Focus: What do you want to achieve from your pre-launch buzz creation campaign?  What exactly do you mean by creating buzz? Yes, the end result is to get more customers or users for your product, but that need not be the sole objective of your campaign. You need to widen the scope and achieve more than that. As mentioned above, some of it could be getting some insights through surveys, handling objections, establishing your thought leadership in the market and so on.

Diligence: The reason I have included this factor here is because the pre-launch is a delicate and sensitive phase in your product lifecycle. It could make or break the product. The right kind of buzz can make the product very successful while a poorly executed pre-launch campaign can make the product introduced with a negative impression. So spend some good, quality time in planning and executing your pre-launch buzz campaign. Spend dedicated time in managing the campaigns and monitor the responses carefully.

I recently came across an interesting pre-launch buzz campaign. This company, IDYeah Labs, has not yet revealed what it is planning to launch but has just introduced a contest asking its Facebook fans to guess what it is up to? Certainly an interesting and welcome effort of using social media (only) for creating the buzz. Let us wait and watch how it works out for the company.

Have you come across any pre-launch buzz campaign which really appealed to you?

Taking Marketing Contribution Beyond Marketing Department

Most of the times, marketing is a separate department in the organizations. There is a ‘marketing team’ which handles all the aspects such branding, positioning, pricing etc. Well, it probably worked well in past when there were only handful ways of reaching out to users. However, with the new age of social media, don’t you think the definition of marketing has expanded to blogging, managing customer comments, reviews, creating and managing social media presence, analyzing results and all such things? Marketing has become a lot about conversation.

I believe that a lot of people in the company – outside the marketing department - can very well participate in this conversation with the users of your products and services.

How? Imagine this:

• Your engineers writing a blog article about the latest technology which your company has mastered
• Your support engineer providing responses to user queries on your online community and resolving issues – beyond email, phone or chat support
• Your technical engineer creating a video on using a particular feature in your product and posting it on YouTube
• Your sales teams posting interesting, informative and educative presentations on presentation sharing websites
• Your content writer gathering inputs about a latest paradigm by participating in discussion forums
• Your technical architect writing a post about a latest, cutting-edge technology and inviting comments from other tech-savvy people around

The list can just go on. So what’s happening here? Variety of people and not just the marketing team are contributing in creating an image, a brand about the company by utilizing their knowledge. Isn’t it great? What more can you expect when the best and experts are in action!

Well, I am convinced on this because I have tried this. Do you think it’s time for you to take a leap in this direction?

Social Buzz Creation through Unusual Celebration of Usability Day

A recent post about FREE website design on one of the social networking sites caught my attention. Well, it was for two reasons: 1) It was offering one FREE website design and 2) which is more peculiar is that the occasion which this company chose for this contest is the "World Usability Day".

Honestly, I had not heard of this day until I saw this post. All of us talk about (like experts) about usability in everything – phones, ipod, TV set, DVD and what not. But I don’t think many of us pay special attention to this aspect when it comes to designing products or experiences. The company, IDYeah Creations, which has announced this contest, offers usability services and UI solutions.

I thought this contest is a very interesting thing for few reasons:

1. By celebrating “Usability Day”, the company is showcasing its passion about usability
2. Website is something which every business needs and probably by doing one FREE website, the company will create an example of how to design a user friendly website and demonstrate the power of usability
3. The amount of buzz this is creating – of course there is some freebie, but more for its uncommon celebration of a not-usually-celebrated day. The company has said that it will choose the winners based on ‘genuine’ need and I am sure many people (like me) are thinking about how to demonstrate the genuine need – more controversy, more buzz!

Things like these convince me that social media and buzz creation have immense potential - provided you add a little bit of creativity to it.

I will be keen to see the website of the lucky winner which IDYeah creates!

Stop Driving the Car by Looking at the Rear Mirror

"Why is my marketing failing? I am doing exactly the same things which that big company had done when they launched their product." – a question which arises when companies introspect on their failed marketing strategies. The answer is simple - "because you drove your car by looking at the rear mirror".

Whatever has worked in past need not work now – the times have changed, people have changed, their perceptions have changed and most importantly, the media has changed. Now the media is more cluttered. It's a lot harder to get people's attention and the right mind share in this cluttered media. And before capturing the market share, it's important to capture the true mindshare.

It is the time when one needs to think beyond traditional advertising and marketing media such as TV, hoardings and paper ads because these are unlikely to give you the mind share – market share comes much later. Earlier when these were the new media, people used to pay attention to advertising. Now people have acquired the art of 'not looking' at advertisements. Grabbing people's attention is more challenging now.

So what are the options? No point in advertising where everybody else is advertising. Identify a media which is unconventional. Something which will give you focused mindshare of your target audience. In past, there have been successful examples of using such clutter free media such as space on peanut bags used by street vendors in New York City or back side of fortune cookie!

Another strategy is leveraging on the early adopters of your product. Make sure that they create the buzz about your product and talk about it. Buyers are more likely to believe in them rather than your advertising.

Have you tried any new marketing idea in your business? Anything which you can share?

Social Media Marketing – Conversation or Conversion?

There is a lot of buzz around social media marketing and Twitter, blogs seem to be the most commonly heard names in that. Companies are either hiring agencies for this or doing it themselves. The goal seems to be to have presence on these mediums and somehow believe that this is all what needs to be done. Once done, everyone starts expecting something out of this – sales managers start expecting “leads”, developers start expecting feedback about their products, business owner starts expecting to know the pulse of users and so on. Is social media only for ‘expecting’ something – or it also means giving? In fact the core concept of social interaction is helping each other in a social network.

To me social media is more about conversation than conversion. It’s a great medium to have communication and connection with your customers and users.

How about using social media for solving some issue if you know the solution, sharing some good news about your company, sharing some achievement, sharing your experiences of using a product/ service, publicly appreciating others’ work, narrating your stories so that others don’t end up reinventing the wheel, sharing tips – about your product or otherwise. The key is to have give and take. It’s about involving people than to just having them on your friends list.

Have you tried using social media in your business or personally? What are your experiences/ success stories?