Viral Campaigns and Unintended Consequences
I’ve been pounding on the difference between viral and organic this whole spring, both on this blog, and in pretty much every meeting that talks about web-based marketing.
Although I know it’s not particularly endearing, I love it when my predictions come true. Back in March, I wrote:
An organic campaign nourishes the hosts (or network nodes), and gains the social ‘word-of-mouth’ hyper-growth as the result of its direct benefit to the host. In fact, organic is not just about a marketing campaign, but should be integral in the design of the product in the first place, reducing the need for flashy or creative marketing.
Take Facebook and LinkedIN as examples. Whether I’m reading the digerati or talking to close colleagues, professionals have become weary of widget spam on Facebook, because the widgets are noise, not signal. But new features from LinkedIN actually provide benefit to professionals, and are therefore quickly adopted. In this comparison, Facebook is viral, LinkedIN is organic.
And now, it turns out, advertisers agree with me. In a post on AlwaysOn, John Shinal wrote,
… new restrictions on Facebook app developers have made it harder to exploit the site’s viral marketing abilities. “They’ve definitely cut down on the viral elements,” said SixApart Director of Marketing Mark Simmons.
He continues,
That kind of super-distribution, not only of text posts but also of pictures and videos, is one reason that Internet traffic is exploding — and why lots of ad inventory is being created on the Web. The problem is that ad dollars have been slow in coming because big brand advertisers want to make sure their logos don’t end up where they don’t want them.
Quad erat demonstratum. The proof.
Viral marketing works at the outset, when it catches on and makes cool buzz, but when the business people show up, marketing needs to deliver nourishing, organic value, not just eye candy.
This also connects into my recent post about how advertising is not a business plan.
The core issue is value as defined by the user, not the provider.
Viral just means the value is so compelling it is willingly shared with other users for no other reason than it is valuable to them at first view or contact.
A truly organic campaign, ideally is about the relationship. Instead of trying to push the user, the provider pulls them with high gravity ideas and solutions, and then surrenders control to the user – which all providers hate to do. 1) because control is power, and 2) power is close to money, which is usually why the solution was provided in the first place.
Facebook worked without qualifications, as did YouTube, when it was truely 2.0 – controlled by the user. Trouble starts when you try to force advertising, or fees, or some other control, power or finance issue down the throats (and eyes) of those who believed the original bull about them being in charge.
Organic relationships are respectful and truly allow the user to be, or not to be viral. That is the question, and the answer.
May 21st, 2008 at 1:33 pmInteresting point; good nuance!
The proverbial million dollar question is how to monetize.
It’s relatively easy to build some lightweight app, like sending a virtual beer to your buddy in Facebook. Clever and popular, but ultimately pointless and empty in terms of devliering value.
I’m more interested in meaningful business uses. One interesting example is the “business case” of progressive philanthropies’ use of Facebook to increase awareness and ultimately philanthropic giving.
I posit that the next round of social network innovation will be the seamless integration of transactions into apps, carrying all the branding components of ‘viral’ marketing, along with some additional value (the company’s core value, optimally) that saves time over the previous mode of interaction.
May 21st, 2008 at 9:56 pm[...] 7. In the seven months since they announced the standard, there are 275 million people in social networks using OpenSocial; 20,000 developers working on it; and 50 million users actively using an OpenSocial application. Now that’s organic growth. [...]
May 30th, 2008 at 4:18 pmIt all boils down to empathy with intended “users”. That is what all good marketing, and social media is all about, in the end.
February 2nd, 2009 at 6:40 pm