Tag Archives: planning

What is viral marketing?

Friends in social media and social networks have asked me for my perspective at gatherings and recent conferences like BizTechDay and SNAP Summit. I used to work at Slideshare, which I joined partially because I was fascinated that it had spent $0 on marketing yet was ranked around 2100 on Alexa. During my first three months, I played a minor part in contributing to its skyrocketing from 2100 to a rank of up to 800. Talk about viral!

There is nothing more satisfying to me than spreading my love through viral marketing. When it comes to warm fuzzies, the more I receive, the more I give back.

Here, I break down the components of viral marketing. Viral marketing is like an interconnected set of gears, or wheels: if one wheel turns, it causes the other wheels to turn.

view on flickr

Here are the aspects of viral marketing you can start using now:

Content and Relevancy

• Viral hooks: I caught up with Dave Morin, a mastermind behind the really really viral Facebook Platform, at the SNAP Summit on Monday. He mentioned that every social network should have viral hooks that pull from relevant and interesting information.
• Leverage online presence: Tap into the online identity of your users across multiple channels. What are the online behaviors of your target audience? Where do they go to play? Blogs, social networks, social media, advertising playgrounds, news sites, etc.
• Brand memorability: Let your viral marketing campaign make use of your current brand value, and also use the campaign to reinforce and increase your brand value. If brand awareness is the goal of your campaign, do an indirect sales pitch (not a direct sales pitch.)
• Useful, relevant information: Make it so and your users will not only believe you, but love you and spread the love for you. Your product’s information must be distinctive and useful, not just average. Add value, don’t diminish it!
• Content – great, new, consistent: This increases your customer base, and furthermore your readership and subscribership. Cater your content towards attracting, retaining, and encouraging the increase of good clients. Let them rely on you, since you *are* a trusted friend.

Action:

• Call to Action: Trigger actions and behaviors by your audience. Make it easy for them to pass the word along. Then, boom! It can spread like wildfire.
• Call to Passion: Passion breeds virality. Trigger strong reactions. Or evoke the (love factor) with your product, service, or website: make them justifiably enamored. Make your audience want it, crave it, need it NO MATTER WHAT.
  

  Passion is the new voice of reason (I can barely contain my excitement as the CEO of AD Village. I *heart* my fellow Villagers.
  

• Authentic: Have a personal voice that resonates with your target audience.
• Forwardability, Transferability: Make something that others are compelled to forward to others. Once they forward it, don’t let the virality stop there: have follow up calls to action within your viral campaign. Push your medium: email, RSS feeds, pasted links, and sharing within instant message chat clients.

Source | Donate

Planning and Implementation

• Scalability: Make sure you’re ready for the traffic resulting from your viral campaign. Copy + paste the basic foundation of your viral campaign into future campaigns so that users can follow a common theme.
• Improvement: Monitor the metrics of your viral marketing campaign so you can improve its results and so you can compare it to those of future campaigns. Sales, revenue, page views, Comscore and Alexa stats, Google rank, new customers, and way more. Get user reviews. Let’s aim to build a solid company that can grow and scale!
• Take Risks: The shock factor. Awe, humor, passion, differentiation. Take a risk, elicit a response.
• Prioritize Time and ROI: Viral marketing does not always make sense for everyone. Make sure your viral campaigns are used to reach your target market.

Price

• Cheap: With so many avenues to do viral marketing, you don’t have to blow your advertising budget. If done well, cost-effective viral campaigns can accomplish your goals.
• Earn $: For the pros only. Make money off of the viral campaign itself. If you’re aiming to convert sales for your company via viral, do a direct sales pitch, where you’re blatantly pitching your product, service, or website.

Start turning a viral wheel today! Email me if you’d like to get together to spin ideas. We frequently do casual OTF (On The Fly) Entrepreneur 2 Entrepreneur chats over coffee and lunch in San Francisco, so make sure to follow my tweets on Twitter.

Marissa Louie founded AD Village (http://ad-village.com) to empower bloggers to maximize their ad space monetization and to enable advertisers to improve their audience targeting. She has written 10+ Funniest Angel and VC Blog Posts October 2008, 10 Types of Ad Targeting, Top 10 Tips to Increase Traffic to Your Blog, and dabbles in blog poetry like *I REVOLT* (A Blog Monetization Poem). She is one of the Geekgirl GFs (The Gigis) and gets esoteric on Twitter.

by Michelle Lentz

I spent a lot of Tuesday planning parties, including one graduation party and one birthday party. I’m also trying to plan a pre-concert tailgating party. In the midst of it all, I decided against using eVite and went on the look for some alternatives.

For the birthday party, I used Socializr. For the graduation party, I used MyPunchBowl, which is pretty, “ajax-y,” and I really liked it. But the winner in the eVite alternative was a little website called Center’d, formerly known as Fatdoor. Center’d is in beta (or as they call it, First Draft), but last week I had a nice conference call with the founders, Jennifer Dulski, who migrated from Yahoo!, and Chandu Thota, who came from Microsoft. Between the two of them, they have the experience to succeed (even if the Yahoo!/Microsoft talks continue to waffle).

Center’d serves as a nice eVite replacement. I was easily able to plan a party, pick a location, and date, and send invites. Center’d offers the nice feature, similar to MyPunchBowl, of voting on places and dates. You can also assign tasks to people, or allow them to volunteer. If you want to bring in an image for your event you can, or you can select from the Creative-Commons licensed set of images provided by Center’d. The real feature in Center’d, however, is its use of location.

Often, location-based networks focus on the West & East Coasts and skip over the middle of the nation. Not Center’d. They’re working on loading data from every place that they can. Cincinnati even had information loaded! Center’d pulls its location information from a variety of sources, including Google Maps and InfoUSA.

You can search for specific things. For instance, I searched for Pizza in Cincinnati and got a good list of results. You can also save your favorite places, as I did with Pomodori’s Pizza. You can use this search feature in two ways: to find something just for you or to help you when planning an event. When possible, they bring in ratings reviews as well, pulling from Yelp! and similar sites.

The information they’re accessing strikes me as about 1 year out of date, based on the restaurants that do – and don’t – display. I also question from where they are pulling the public event info. I’m thrilled that the information is available, but as of right now, the information [on Cincinnati events at least] is more odd than useful.

There is a social networking aspect to the site as well. You can “friend” other people and view their favorite places. If I know that Erica’s favorite place is Club Dv8, then I might be more inclined to try it myself. As in Facebook, you can view other people’s connections, as well as your shared connections, which is always interesting. Because you can add tags and a bio to your profile, you can also learn a little bit about other people, which is helpful for conversation starters.

Center’d nicely combines local search with a easy-to-use set of planning tools. Perhaps location-based everything is the future, whether in the new iPhone, in BrightKite, or in Center’d. It’s popping up a lot. Perhaps that means that while we all like the Web, we’d rather use it to meet in person.

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Events, news, apps, and more – let me know at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, via Twitter, or via Pownce.