Perhaps the best analogy I’ve come across for how to “start” a marketing effort that “goes viral” came from Tom O’Brien’s post “Viral Marketing is Stupid.”
Here’s why.
Simply put, you cannot create a viral video.
You can create a video and hope it goes viral.
Viral is the Effect. Not the Cause.
What Tom did in this post (which was introduced to me after he and I met virtually as a follow-up to my post on Influencers vs. Fans), is share a visual story that Duncan Watts offered up.
Think of a video (or anything) that goes viral as the equivalent of a forest fire (which fits nicely into my “Marketing is Gasoline, Not Matches” mantra, but I digress.)
As Tom writes:
Forest fires start and stop all the time.
There are thousands of forest fires every year.
Only a few of them become the monster forest fires we see on TV consuming homes and acreage in vast quantities. How are these few mega-fires different from the thousands of small ones? Is it because they started from a really “special” tree? (An influential tree perhaps??)
No. The mega-fires started in a place and at a time where fuel, weather and other conditions were precisely right, and continued to be precisely right to grow into a TV-worthy blaze.
Your job as a marketer, which Tom clearly illustrates, is to do what you can to create this “perfect storm” of conditions (or do the best you can to create it), so that when a spark is lit, the raging inferno takes off.
Actually, now that I think about it, what happened to help the Influencers vs. Fans reach over 500k people may be a good example of that.
I spend a lot of time trying to make the blog “viral-ready.”
- I added a “Share This” button to each post
- There is a TweetMeme button that says “tweet this” on each post
- Disqus was implemented into the blog so that I could respond to every single commenter on the site (which led to more exposure)
Plus, there were elements that made it possible for people to more deeply engage with the blog/site such as (links to the FB fan page, MyBlogLog community, Google Friend Connect, and subscribe to the blog by email or RSS).
The “viral moments” don’t come along, but if you can make it easy for people to spread the word (right conditions), they will help fuel the fire.
Then, be ready to take advantage of it when it comes.
The key thing…prepare now because you cannot plan on when it will happen.
