9 Mantras for Viral Marketing

Hello everyone! I thought I’d start this with an interesting two-sided story. In the first side of our story, there was a small town where everyone lived harmoniously with utmost happiness and health. One fine day, a virus known as “Rabies Virus” was introduced into the town, and that changed the very fate of the town. The virus set itself on a dog and made it go rabid. The dog bit three other dogs in the town, and died. In turn, these rabid dogs bit and killed a couple of other dogs and humans, and finally died. This went on, and on, and on, and that was the grim end of the whole town. What a sad story really!

                                    In the second side of our story, there was another town where a marketer created a promotional video and placed itself on social media sites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. The video was taken up by a couple of influential social media geeks, and they shared it to their friends, and in turn, their friends shared it to their own friends. The video spread on and on, creating huge brand awareness, and finally resulted in huge revenues for the marketer. What a success story really!

Well, hope you figured out at least 7 connections in this analogy.

Now, what contributes to the viral behavior?

 ►Pass-along-appeal of content

o   Content is king

o   Interesting enough to be forwarded (likeability)

     ►Medium of propagation

o   Sharer’s network’s size and activeness of their network

     ►Ease of sharing

o   Conspicuous and Easy CTA

With this, let’s Jump on to the 9 mantras of viral marketing:

1.        Keep it short.

2.       Entice and make them share.
Stir up emotion- make your audience laugh or cry, or resonate with them. But don’t be overly promotional

3.       Once the promotion is ready, start “seeding” it.
 Comment on relevant blogs, groups, video sites, Facebook pages,  email lists, with promo links. There is a great synergy among different social media sites- exploit it!

4.      Relevance is key.
Interesting and relevant is viral. But irrelevant content to an irrelevant audience is spam, even if the content is interesting.

5.       Make it easily accessible.
Use effective keywords, titles and relevant image captions to optimize search results.

6.      Use relevant celebrities in the promotions; they are effective message carriers.

7.       Make it re-mixable or customizable to encourage user-generated content. 

8.      Sometimes ‘heated comments’ are good! Keeps the ball rolling.

But here’s a word of caution: Look out for controversies and beware of black listing!

9.      Use a data-driven strategy 
Use Analytics to understand which are the sites that are driving the most ‘shares’, what demographics are sharing the most, average view time/ visit time, etc. Monitor, listen, measure and engage. Adapt accordingly. 

If you’re someone who loves illustrations and examples, refer to my slide-deck on viral marketing in the Slideshare Presentations section.

A final word- Be 'rabid'; Go 'viral'! Eeehahahaa..  If there is any more mantras you wanted to include, add them in the comments section! See you all with yet another interesting, informative and quick-sinking post soon! Marketing-ey-potri-potri!!