Most Viruses Are Curable: "Viral" Campaigns Often Don't Spread

By: Sam Ford, PepperDigital

If you didn't hear the news earlier this summer, I have a heartbreaker for you: viral marketing doesn't always work.  As The New York Times' Phyliss Korkki points out in her July piece, a 2008 Jupiter report has shown that many viral campaigns don't get enough buzz.

There are a few reasons to explain this.  First, go see Henry Jenkins' post about the Convergence Culture Consortium concept of spreadable media, an idea that the Consortium is currently working on fleshing out further internally with the core team at MIT in conjunction with C3 corporate partners...(I am involved with the public side of C3's work and am not part of the proprietary work they do with their corporate partners).

But then let's return to the fundamental idea behind word-of-mouth: it takes real decisions by real people to really spread a message.  Sure, people can game the system to create false views, pretend there is buzz around a video, and so on.  Why would a brand want that?  It's rare that fabricated buzz can really kick-start a national phenomenon, and why a company would want to pay to generate buzz within itself and then claim it was an international success is beyond me.

The idea of putting up content that took little to produce, making it captivating, and hoping it finds a core audience makes a great deal of sense to me.  Calling it viral, though?  That's what you end up with when you get a press release from Xerox touting the launch of a viral campaign.

Bianca Bartz at TrendHunter points out writes, "Web 2.0 called for a rise in viral ads in order to best reach target consumers, yet a recent study by JupiterResearch shows that only 15% of these ads have been effective."  She goes on to point out that many people feel these viral campaigns have been successful, even when they have little to prove it.

In my opinion, all the chatter about "viral" is an example of the dangers of "overhype," as I've written about before.  In short, expectations are set so high that all companies think they have to do to have a runaway Internet video is make marginally entertaining content, e-mail it out to people, and set back and watch is spread.  But there's a public out there, an audience who is quite active in deciding whether something will spread or not.

And, thankfully, it doesn't work all the time.  It doesn't even work most of the time.  Because if it did, if there were some magical button to push, we'd all be even more inundated with junk e-mail and half-baked ideas.  Truth is, if you want something to be spread, it has to resonate with an audience to the point that they'll want to share it.  And that's not ultimately up to the producer of the message.

Comments

[Mike Arauz]

I totally agree.

And the irony of this lack of understanding is that "viral" has a very clear and simple definition: if the content inspires individual audience members to tell an average of more than 1 other person about the content, then it's viral. If you don't break that more than 1 pass-along threshold, then it's not viral. Clients need to understand this.

[Sam Ford]

Great to hear from you, Mike!

And good point, in that viral does have a simple definition about pass-along that seems to nonetheless confuse people (primarily because some are looking to make it the next "brand-building," perhaps a useful term but one that people want to write all their failures off as successes by putting them under that category). From the work MIT C3 has done on "spreadability," the central part of the concept is putting agency back into the equation: reminding people that, unlike a biological virus, people have autonomy in deciding whether to spread content or not. A campaign can't be "viral" unless the audience wants it to be.