Viral marketing represents a brave new media world with its own set of rules that have little to do with traditional media concepts.
That was the basic message from a panel of executives expounding on how to ignite viral campaigns at the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York yesterday.
“New media is finally shaking off the shackles of being old media behavior,” said Conn Fishburn, director of social media strategy for Yahoo.
The younger generations of surfers on the Web—which currently draws 800 million visitors daily—lack a traditional media frame of reference.
“They have no old habits to unlearn,” Fishburn said.
The consensus of the panel was that content is king, but tactics make or break viral strategy. Success depends on “priming” network conditions by seeding content on many Web sites and taking a “holistic” approach to integrating elements in a particular campaign, Fishburn said.
“The killer application of the Web has always been people,” he said.
And people are a most influential brand element: Yahoo’s research indicates that 76% of American consumers typically mention 10 brands daily in conversations with fellow consumers.
Nielsen research indicates that 78% of consumers trust the opinions of others about those brands, according to Fionn Downhill, CEO & president of Elixir Systems.
Among the keys to success she cited were: Giving away products and services, exploiting consumer motives and behavior, and using existing networks and others’ online resources.
Her company’s work with the Tennis Channel consistently includes seeding tennis blogs and forums with information about the cable network. The result, she said, has vaunted the Tennis Channel into the top 10 in search results for “tennis.”
Downhill also exhorted brand exposure to the 60 million monthly visitors on YouTube: “Fun, quirky videos work great on YouTube.”
Ed Kim, CEO of Red Bricks Media, emphasized the importance of creating buzz with “outrageous and unusual” content. He also stressed identifying the audience and finding appropriate sites to distribute content.
In his company’s work with video game maker THQ, Kim said it drew gamers in with a riddle posted on gamer site Destructoid and created profiles of game characters for gamers to interact with. Red Bricks also employs staff for blogger outreach to engage in casual, unbusinesslike dialogue online. “We tried to build a recipe on how to bring a campaign viral.”
But Bill Hanekamp, CEO of The Well, said there’s really no way of telling at the outset whether a campaign will have a virulent viral afterlife. He noted that Office Max built 20 sites before its dancing elf site took on a life of its own.
And he delineated one of the key differentiating factors between the old and new media worlds: “In the old days, you had to spend so much on the media portion of it. Now you can spend more on content.”
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