Objectives

Like any other project you start by clearly defining the objectives of the campaign. With Viral campaigns it’s practically set. Most of viral marketing campaigns intent to obtain visibility for the brand, person or product.

These campaigns don’t intent to sell anything, not directly at least, that would probably not work as well as expected but instead they intent to focus attention on the brand creating a hype and eventually word of mouth.

For this you need to focus your campaign on your target audience. Know your demographic and Geo target, understand what might make an impact and take advantage of it.

Ideas

After defining the objectives of the campaign you need to brainstorm ideas. At this moment you and your team should get really creative. In the past I participated in a small sprint where a team of 5 to 6 people gathered in a closed room and shared ideas. This process allowed us to share knowledge and create a strong start point.

Here’s how I like to brainstorm ideas:

1. Gather a team on an isolated room. Make sure that team has people from different departments, ages, genders, etc.
2. Get something to write ideas where everyone can see them clearly
3. Ask the team to shoot ideas from their heads in 15 minutes
4. Use additional 5 to 10 minutes talk to your team and determine what ideas are worth developing
5. In the end I take the ideas and investigate trying to develop concepts and strategies for each one.

Now come a tricky part. You have your ideas, you have created concepts now you need to focus on what will engage people and make people spread this idea.

Motivation

If you want to go viral you need to make users act on their own. You need to study them, understand where they are coming from and what is attractive to them. The problem comes when you want to create something global. For example in Portugal, a while ago, many people shared a video from a group of comedians in Angola. This video had no impact, once so ever in Spain a country with a very similar language and costumes. The same happened with other group of comedians from Portugal.
On the other hand in late 2009 I found a Spanish video telling a very peculiar story that I called “The funniest story of 2009“. Turns out the video is older than that but the story, in Spanish with Portuguese subtitles, made me laugh so hard that I even cried.

Reminding me of that I got curious and explored around the subject of motivation and found that there are 4 particularly effective ways to motivate people to take action regardless of their age, gender, culture, language, etc.

• Possession – offer something they want
• Gratification – Make people feel good by sharing
• Instant Satisfaction – Make people feel happy
• Awesomeness – Go big

Possession – give something people want

The most common use of this technique are contests where you have the big prize which is normally something really expensive and most of the target audience want and low cost prizes to reinforce participation the contest.

By pitching the sense of possession of people you are motivating them to take action. You show the objective and tell them if you want it, than you need to do that, and so they will.

Other ideas are giveaways or giving users something they want. I hear this everyday on the radio where most of them use social media sites, particularly Facebook, to give their audience tickets, gifts, etc.

Gratification – Make people feel good by sharing

The best example I can give of a viral marketing campaign based on gratification is the breast cancer campaign “what color is your bra?” where woman all over Facebook received the following message:

Some fun is going on…. just write the color of your bra in your status. Just the color, nothing else. It will be neat to see if this will spread the wings of breast cancer awareness. It will be fun to see how long it takes before people wonder why all the girls have a color in their status… Haha .

This campaign spread worldwide and asked nothing in return from the people involved. There was no fund raising, no giveaways, just the gratification of doing something for breast cancer.

Instant satisfaction – Make people feel happy

What is instant satisfaction? Remember the first time you saw Jeff Dunham – Achmed the Dead Terrorist video?

I remember laughing uncontrollably for a long time, even when I saw the video for the second and third time when I knew exactly what they where going to say.
This feeling of laughter and happiness was my instant satisfaction. The video made me feel great as I watched it and by the end I only thought on sharing it with my friends and apparently over 100 million people had the same idea and the result is one of the most visualized videos on Youtube which made wonders for Jeff Dunham career.

Doing something awesome – Go big

The JK Weeding Entrance Dance went live in July 2009 and in the past 12 months has gathered over 50.000.000 views.

Jill and Kevin met when Kevin’’s childhood friend, Jeff, married Jill’s college friend, Ann, in 2005. They were both in the wedding party. Jill could not resist Kevin’s wit and charm. Kevin could not resist Jill’s intellect, nor her remarkable dance moves.

As a result of sharing this original video on Facebook, Chris Brown song Forever, the song you ear on the video, had a burst in sales achieving #6 on iTunes in just one week since the video release July 2009.

Early in 2010 Jill and Kevin decided to make something positive out of the video went on to support Sheila Wellstone Institute, an organization focused on ending domestic violence in North American communities, by allowing people to donate from the official video and cause website. This action collected over 30.000 dollars in just over 3 months.

In September 2009 the Black Eyed Peas organized the biggest FlashMob in the world for the 24th anniversary of the Oprah Show. While many argue whether this can be called a Flash Mob, the result in unarguably something awesome.

This campaign has been passed around millions of times and served as inspiration of many other marketing campaigns. One of my favorites being TAP Christmas Flash Mob show at the Lisbon Airport.

Notice that no campaign is trying to sell. Viral marketing does not intent to sell and this is where most marketeers, accounts and CEO’s fail to understand the investment in viral marketing.

U.V.T.A – The primary Viral Marketing Results

During my personal brainstorm session about viral marketing I ended up typing a bunch of words in my notes that I later resumed into Users, Visibility, Trust and Awareness or UVTA, the primary results of a viral marketing campaign.

Here’s how standard viral marketing works someone comes up with an idea and shares it. If it’s good it gives the user something they want or instant satisfaction, therefor they will like it and share with other users.
This is online word-of-mouth and it will bring you visibility through the users. If this is a positive campaign it will strengthen the user – brand relationship. In the end users will acknowledge the brand positively thus creating a positive brand awareness.

A great example of positive brand awareness is Starbucks Facebook page. It went through a strange viral outcome due to Starbucks actions and customer support on Facebook and Twitter. Their actions made users spread the word about what they were doing and they were doing something social, something innovative that took the brand to the top of Facebook and achieving over 10 Million Facebook Likes.

I hope you find this article useful and I ask you to share it with your friends and contacts. My intentions at this point is gathering insights around the subject of creating and developing viral marketing campaigns and hope it will lead to people sharing thoughts and insights on the subject. I would really like to know what you have to say.

Mário Andrade