Whenever the notion of ‘viral’ is discussed with an unsuspecting audience, you generally get the kind of response one might expect when talking about offal, the birth of oversized babies or Celine Dion recordings.
But viral marketing is actually the business operator’s very best friend.
And it’s not as new a concept as it is often made out to be.
Viral marketing has been around since the dawn of time. Or at least the dawn of communication.
The best-known form of viral is the promotional mainstay of business of all shapes and sizes – word-of-mouth.
The number of businesses that survive on word-of-mouth alone is astronomical. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to work out that when you really look after your customers, they will soon tell anyone within earshot about your great service and/or the great deal they received from you.
Or subsequently, notwithstanding libel and/or defamation laws, the bad deal you gave them.
Traditional media the mass market pioneers
The traditional media were the first to really harness viral to spread at the speed of sound. There are thousands of examples of rags to riches stories resulting from a passing mention in a newspaper article or TV or radio program. As a result, good publicists became worth their weight in gold as they found new story angles for your otherwise pedestrian product.
The best example of this is the music industry. Without free airtime on television and radio the industry simply could not afford the promotional dollars required to reach a wide audience and would cease to exist in its current form.
The digital revolution of course has given word-of-mouth amazing new legs.
Nowadays, you don’t even have to open said mouth to achieve unprecedented viral.
Now computers and mobile devices have customers spreading the word faster than you can say Ashton Kutcher.
And you don’t need to be a gun publicist to be part of the action.
Now everyone’s a broadcaster!
A well timed ‘tweet’ can have web users, limited only by the capacity of your hosting provider, scurrying to your website in minutes.
Similarly an extraordinary video clip posted on YouTube can attract literally millions of viewers from around the globe in an astonishingly short timeframe. Such as the literally overnight sensation of (amazing) singer Susan Boyle who went from zero to heroine in a matter of hours thanks to a post of her performance on Britain’s Got Talent.
Or news of Michael Jackson’s demise, which probably represented the first time in history that people outside the city of origin received the news from social networks well before the traditional media could verify and report the story.
So how does the business owner tap into this rich vein of promotion and subsequent enquiry?
Lets look at the chief protagonists.
1. Your website
Believe or not, websites are seen by many new media commentators as old hat these days as they wax lyrical about sexier Web 2.0 and now 3.0 capabilities.
But most small businesses are still a long way from getting this fundamental right.
Your website is viral in many ways. First, just by sitting it out there on the information superhighway it ‘virally’ attracts the attention of the search engine’s ‘robots’ and ‘spiders’ to come crawling by collecting your content keywords and serving them up to people searching for information on those very words.
This capability becomes even more effective whenever you add new content as it gives these automated crawlers more excuses to visit.
So by adding new content regularly you make your website a regular target for search engines. The good news is that you no longer need to be very geeky at all to add this content yourself, as easy to use editors or Content Management Systems are now very affordable.
Secondly, a good website can virally grow your client database by attracting visitors to sign up for your eNewsletter or other item of value. No business that hopes to attract repeat business should ignore this powerful and essentially free capability.
2. Email marketing
Email marketing is an extremely cost-effective way of maintaining your viral. By releasing regular messages of interest, you not only remind existing customers and prospects that you are in the market for their business, but if it’s really valuable then they will forward it to interested others.
A famous example of this was when Carlton and United Breweries emailed its staff to tell of its new television commercial for its staple Carlton Draught (the ‘Big’ ad) with the instruction to forward to as many friends and family as possible.
Before you think ‘spam’, think again. Very cleverly, CUB knew that emails sent to friends and family are not considered ‘spam’ by the authorities, as distinct from sending it to the same people directly from the marketing department without their consent.
Within months, the online video unleased a torrent of 1.7 million viewers around the world, including 10,000 people in Hungary in one day(!).
While CUB spent millions on the ad, the ensuing email cost them nothing at all.
Nowadays you can get rent professional email marketing systems for only a few dollars a month. Best viral (as well as productivity) is achieved though when your Email Marketing System is integrated with your website and its underlying system.
3. User Generated Content
User Generated Content (UGC) is media content (text, images, video or audio) contributed to a website by ordinary website visitors. The best and most famous example of this is the ubiquitous YouTube which went from a great idea to an online media monolith in a matter of months.
User Generated Content can comprise text (via blogs, comments, reviews and participation in forums), images (via sites like Photobucket), video, audio and even Powerpoint presentations via sites like SlideShare.
While UGC has some Social Networking capabilities, it essentially differs from it in that it can exist without ensuing conversation, unlike Social Networking which IS the conversation.
Business operators too can contribute content to these sites and gain outstanding viral as said content can link back to your website, driving traffic and gaining valuable brownie points (actually highly qualified links) from Google et al.
If you don’t have time to do this, reduced but still useful benefits can be achieved simply by commenting on other people’s content contributions, such as leaving a comment below this very article.
4. Social Networking
By now you would well be familiar with this recent viral phenomenon. Literally ‘word of mouse’, Social Networking is conversation on steroids.
And instead of the one-to-one conversation that marked word-of-mouth, Social Networking is one to many.
For the first time in history, an ordinary individual can potentially broadcast a message to literally millions of people simultaneously.
The effect of this is truly revolutionary and stunningly viral.
While both websites and emails can broadcast a message instantaneously, both lack the immediately viral capabilities of Social Networking.
For example, a good email may take days to achieve its viral work, whereas a ‘tweet’ on Twitter can take only minutes.
On the other hand, a tweet may not be seen by all of a Twitter’s ‘followers’ unlike email which at least has a good chance of being seen by its recipients, even if it’s not opened. Because a tweet occurs at a specific point in time, followers may not be viewing their Twitter pages at that point in time and miss it altogether.
In this way Twitter, for example, is more like scheduled broadcast media unlike email which is more like direct marketing.
Either way, its low barriers to entry make it a technique well worth considering and experimenting with.
Whichever techniques you tap into, what is fundamental to them all is the worth of the ‘story’. The more ‘newsworthy’ the message is, be it phenomenal service, a product release, discount or new development, the more people will blog, tweet, forward, text, comment and generally disseminate the information.
I hope this series of blogs has provided some insights into some of the latest ways a smaller business can make and save money via the new ‘rivers of gold’.
In the meantime feel free to culture a little of your own viral by commenting below!
For more Internet Secrets, click here.
Craig Reardon is a leading eBusiness educator and founder and director of independent web services firm The E Team which provide the gamut of ‘pre-built’ website solutions, technologies and services to SMEs in Melbourne and beyond.
Smart Company is the leading online publication in Australia for free news, information and resources catering to Australia’s entrepreneurs, small and medium business owners and business managers.
