Posted By
Jamie Beckland on 06/02/2010
Countless times each week, someone asks me how to make their marketing go viral. Virality is the holy grail for social media marketing: your message gets coveted word-of-mouth pass-along, and reach is magnified by orders of magnitude. Having a viral hit can lift a brand from near-horizontal growth to near-vertical growth. It’s also widely seen as free—what could be better?
After years of working in social media and activating social communities time and time again, White Horse has the viral formula down cold. There are five main characteristics that cause something to go viral. We prefer to create content that uses all of them, but you simply can’t have a viral hit without being at least some of these:
- Timely. In social media, news wins. And only the first discovery is the winner. If you are going to go for pushing timely content to your community, it must be a trusted resource, or faster than anyone else. But, preferably both.
- Important. You have to think of importance in the context of your community. You don’t have to share content about the oil spill in the Gulf if it doesn’t resonate with your brand. But you should create content that is important for your industry.
- Entertaining. When people are entertained, they naturally want to share that feeling with their friends. Creating content that entertains is not easy—especially to do it consistently—but it is worth it.
- Beautiful. Design is increasingly important to content creation and distribution. In a world awash with cheap, frivolous, and meaningless content, design is seen as a proxy for quality and trustworthiness. Investing in well-designed content, like thoughtful infographics that boil down complicated statistics to enhance understanding, pays off in shareability.
- Surprising: When you defy someone’s expectations, they stop and notice. They may even question. And that becomes a shareable moment. Facts and statistics are often surprising. Going against conventional wisdom is also surprising. Look for the surprising aspect of your information to improve virality.
Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that luck does play a part. There is no formulaic way to guarantee that something goes viral. But, luck = persistence + timing. Luck is a learned skill. And you learn best by doing, so stop reading this blog post and start making something!
Seriously. Stop reading this. Start creating. Now.
Caught you—you’re still reading, aren’t you?
Tags: online brand development, Web communities, social networks
Comments (5)
| "After years of working in social media and activating social communities time and time again, White Horse has the viral formula down cold"
Jamie - that's a bold statement - can you list some the "viral" campaigns WH has produced? (maybe share some links) As well, can you share metrics associated with these examples that prove-out virality? Thanks
Posted by: s kulu (sossikulu@gmail.com) on 06/07/2010 |
| Sure, I’m happy to offer some examples. While some client relationships require that we do not disclose specific campaigns or metrics, I can tell you about a few.
2004: Microsoft’s Buddy Program
White Horse created one of Microsoft’s first social communities with a matchmaking site that paired Microsoft employees with Independent Software vendors. Our viral marketing campaign featured Microsoft executives reciting classic Windows error messages as beat poetry. More than 1500 employees – triple Microsoft’s program goal – signed up in the first month.
http://members.microsoft.com/partner/asia/isv/gettingstarted.aspx
2006: Celestial Seasons Fast Lane Tea
White Horse identified a social movement to bring Fast Lane tea back into production, then worked with Celestial Seasons to relaunch the product, targeting only the online petitioners. Within a month of relaunch, Fast Lane was outselling the next-best-selling Celestial tea online by a factor of 6x.
http://celestialseasonings.elsstore.com/view/product/?id=34744
http://www.whitehorse.com/_templates/t_work.aspx?taxid=96&subid=219
2007: Columbia Sportswear Reel Stories
Our viral video campaign for Columbia’s specialty fishing gear challenged fishermen to spot the liar among 4 fish tales. With traffic driven only by social seeding and pass-along, the campaign drove 10,000 entries in 21 days and is featured in MarketingSherpa’s Viral Marketing Hall of Fame.
http://www.whitehorse.com/_templates/t_work.aspx?taxid=96&subid=906
2009: Durock Tile Membrane
White Horse created a social seeding and blogger outreach program to B2B audiences for this tile substrate that exceeded sales goals by 500% within two months of program launch.
http://durocktilemembrane.com/
2010: Mountain Hardwear Pack Promotion
White Horse engaged with social sites and Twitter to give users the ability to Tweet directly from a banner unit. This was an industry first, and drove strong response from the core Mountain Hardwear audience – they were 55 times more likely to engage with the contest than other similar marketing efforts.
http://www.clickz.com/3640353
Posted by: jamie (jbeckland@whitehorse.com) on 06/07/2010 |
| Jamie - Thanks for the follow-up, but I still fail to see any viral metrics associated with any of these projects. What percent of the employees who signed up for Buddy Program was a result of viral efforts (i.e. someone shared it with them or they shared with someone else)? Same with Celestial Fast Lane, Columbia Reel Stories, Durock and Mountain Hardware. How do you know it wasn't the "social seeding" and not a true viral effect that led to campaign "success"? If you could at least share % of respondent metrics it would help substantiate your original claim of White Horse having "the viral formula down cold". So far there's no proof of that - especially when compared to major players in the space like Feed Company, Radical Media or Viral Factory who get staggering pass-along metrics on some of their work.
Also, Mountain Hardware was not the first to use Tweet enabled banners. The folks in the blog aggregation business were doing this in 2008.
It's all well and good to be a cheerleader for your employer - but keep it real. peace
Posted by: s kulu (sossikulu@gmail.com) on 06/08/2010 |
| S-
You’ve done a great job articulating the very problem that social media faces: a fascination with itself. When I say that White Horse has the viral formula down cold, I’m talking about creating social strategies that stand up to real tests of value: ROI, revenue generation, and profitability. Net promoter scores, % of respondent metrics, and pass-along metrics are all really useful when trying to justify a story with some big numbers and sell in waaa-aa-ay more than a client needs. But, there’s no “there” there. None of the other agencies you mention provide even the faintest whiff of a comparison between the cost of the campaigns (I’m talking all-in, with creative, supporting media spends, and social seeding) and the increase in bottom-line profitability. They can grasp at views as proving value, but I’ll stick with the tried and true formula of “cost < revenue.” And, I’d love to see other third-party served campaigns that have allowed users to Tweet directly from in the banner unit – including creating full copy within the unit, and using oAuth for instant posting all without leaving the site they are on. We couldn’t find any other references of this technology, nor could our partners, or ClickZ when they wrote up the Mountain Hardwear campaign: http://www.clickz.com/3640353. It’s easy to cheerlead great work. Thanks for commenting.
Posted by: Jamie (jbeckland@whitehorse.com) on 06/08/2010 |
| I guess I would be remiss if I didn't also mention that, while I can't disclose specifics, I can assure you that the seeding efforts on all of these campaigns was a *tiny* fraction of the overall response.
Posted by: Jamie (jbeckland@whitehorse.com) on 06/08/2010 |
