A World Gone Viral

Caught a conversation lately?

It’s official, with the release of the iPhone into New Zealand, talk of it coming to the Telecom network and its cascade of me-too imitations, we are officially a brand-in-the-hand society.

For years marketers have yearned for low-cost, high-impact ways of getting the message across in a way that seemingly gains its own momentum, minimising ongoing investment in expensive, cumbersome and distant mass media, while maximising reach and the credibility that comes when the messenger is as close to home as possible.

Word-of-mouth and viral marketing are just two of the key manifestations of these sorts of ideas - both of them built on strengths that come with messenger and recipient being extremely cosy. The rise of PDAs drags these two campaign clip-ons out of the shadows, and firmly back into their moment in the sun.

Getting people talking

When I worked in radio a hundred years ago (at least, that’s the way it feels!) we used to line everything up against the water cooler test. Would it promote talk around the water cooler? If so, sweet. If not – ditch it. We were breakfast radio jocks, not marketers. But instinctively we understood that if we could get people at the office talking about that morning’s show, maybe a few of their friends would tune in tomorrow.

While word-of-mouth – still, despite the rise of mass media, the foundation stone of the marketing activity of a significant number of businesses and not-for-profits – has always been harder to define, capture and get to behave in sensible ways, viral techniques, with their pseudo-scientific sounding list of attributes have been easier for marketers to grasp, explain and apply. Good viral campaigns use existing relationships to spread messages through self-replicating viral (i.e something that is easily transmitted and caught) processes.

Part of the appeal of viral is that it’s relatively easy to line a potential campaign up against a pre-existing list of criteria that we are all already familiar with – the sort of conditions that are necessary for the common cold to take hold.

It’s catching

Successful viral marketing campaigns have much in common with successful diseases: they are more easily transmitted through close contact by people who trust one another enough to have close physical proximity, and once planted, spread exponentially. A certain threshold has to be reached for a disease to really take hold – and then it gains a life of its own, requiring nothing in terms of further investment from its point of origin – making it incredibly elegant in budgetary terms.

An attention-deficit society coupled with mass media overload and the rise of technologies like My Sky (allowing viewers to skip through ads at warp sound) have led to marketers working harder than ever to find ways to cut through – not just in media terms, but in the very essence of messaging, too.

And in a climate of anti-hierarchy and the flattening of traditional structures, peer-to-peer is more important than ever.

Power to the people

Clay Shirky addresses it nicely in his seminal book ‘Here Comes Everybody: the power of organizing without organizations’. His view is that the seismic shift that personal media devices like iPhone and the Blackberry (referred to some as ‘brand in the hand’) bring is not so much the technology (though there is no denying it’s cool!) but the power that everyday people now have to be broadcasters, as well as receivers of messages. He likens the current internet revolution to the introduction of the telephone and television, in terms of significance, but the difference, he says, is the incredible power that the average person gains when they become media outlets in their own right.

Shirky does a great job of methodically deconstructing how trends emerge and opinions form – it’s inspiring parallel reading to a review of the Obama campaign (check out our Exchange discussion for more) with its groundbreaking use of personal media like Twitter and text messages. Shirky is also a good read if you are interested in the dark side of word-of-mouth and viral.

Viral downunder

Downunder we're only just beginning to see the potential that personal media devices bring to corporate comms of any kind - let alone the pass-it-on variety.

Organisations like Air New Zealand have been at the forefront of introducing the sort of technology that allows for a truly one-to-one, tailored message set, with its flight update services. And texting featured heavily in the last election campaign. But the two main telecoms have turned most of us off the idea by texting us to let us know our bill’s overdue.

There’s a lot of product and competition-based activity, and tertiary institutions have embraced text technology with open arms as a way to connect with 'Generation Unreachable'. But we’ve yet to see much in the way of really clever pass-it-on campaigns – the sort of thing to rival some of the viral emails that manage to capture popular imagination and skip from one in-box to the next.

Those that get it right

The shining exception is the work of 42 Below, whose rapid growth has been built primarily on viral campaigns. It’s also hugely content based; given the brand’s irreverent stance and dismissal of tradition, it stands to reason they would look to alternative marketing techniques to sit at the core of their brand platform.

And they are not alone.

Andrew Tinning, Group Creative Director of Perth based agency Market Force, says there is no doubt that content is king in an interactive web environment, but the medium can be as just as important as the message.

“Companies like Nike and Apple are expected to be at the forefront. We expect to see them use cutting-edge technologies in their marketing, not just their products. So if you’re in that space and you’re not there, that can be a risk.”

And how they do it

Tinning points to the phenomenal success of Earth Hour in Australia as a great example of B2B viral marketing.

“The idea of not doing something for 24 hours is nothing new, but it’s just the way they’ve implemented it.”

The original Aussie Earth Hour was conceived by a media group and ad agency – who used the power of their own networks to make it hum.

“They went out to all their own clients, like McDonalds, and got them to switch off their signs, all the lights in all their stores, and that’s a great thing for McDonalds, because they’re trying to fight that whole mythology about cutting down rainforests. For them, it makes sense to do something like that.”