Viral Marketing Overview
From The Yaffe Center
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Revision as of 08:49, 20 May 2010
I. Introduction
Traditional marketing, such as a television ad showcasing a laundry detergent’s relative cleaning power, is a linear marketing strategy, the goal of which is grab a consumer’s attention for long enough to deliver a scripted message. Buzz marketing represents a divergent marketing strategy; its goal is to leverage the impressions created by an initial marketing message by inciting consumers to organically spread that message or an interpretation of that message through the consumer’s social or professional network. Buzz marketing can serve a wide variety of products and be implemented in countless ways. The one thing that all Buzz campaigns have in common is that they get consumers and media outlets to spread the message for free. Outside of that, Buzz, if properly executed, can serve any product or service. Some campaigns use the internet to allow consumers to spread information or participate in games or contests, other campaigns attempt to get the mainstream media to pick up a story or piece of content and spread it to consumers, who will then talk about it with each other, still other campaigns offer free products to consumers in the hope that they will then tell their friends about it. Pick any media where information can be transferred, any product category, and any genre of marketing content, from purely functional to purely entertaining with no over commercial message at all, and Buzz marketers have attempted to find a winning combination of those factors to accomplish their business goals.
The purpose of this paper is to provide marketers with an understanding of the intellectual underpinnings of Buzz marketing and a strategic and tactical framework for harnessing the power of Buzz marketing. Through the structured approach described in this paper, marketers will gain the ability launch and manage a Buzz marketing campaign in a way that will optimize ROI, however that goal may be defined. The tactics in this paper are also tools that a marketer can use to manage a spontaneously occurring Buzz campaign/naturally occurring brand buzz to generate incremental ROI from ongoing traditional campaigns.
II. The Buzz Campaign Process
Ability and Desire
At its most conceptual level, creating a buzz marketing campaign is about giving consumers both the ability (often through connective technologies) and the desire (in the form of social or economic currency ) to buzz about your product or service. Of course, in theory, every consumer has the ability to buzz to someone about anything they want to. In that respect, ability and desire are not distinct entities, but symbiotic components, and lack of desire can be compensated for by enabling the ability to buzz, and vice versa.
In today’s cyber-connected world, the ability to buzz has grown tremendously, as the cost of sharing information has fallen to nearly zero, there can be little doubt of that. While twenty years ago, if one wanted to share a newspaper article with a friend, one would have to cut it out and either fax it or mail it. A significant time investment, and some financial investment, was necessary either way. Today, someone with a few mouse clicks and keystrokes can accomplish that same thing.
Beginning with understanding how likely consumer are to buzz about your product, one can plan to create the optimal amount of desire, matching with the appropriate facilitating technologies, to inspire consumers to buzz. Below please find the 7 step process this paper has identified for designing a successful buzz campaign. The remainder of this section will proceed through the Buzz Campaign Process in a step-by-step fashion.
1. Evaluate Your Product Category for Buzz Potential: Different Product Categories Have Different Inherent Buzz Proclivity
Naturally, consumers will talk about certain classes of products. Entertainment such as music and movies, are frequently discussed commercial products. Products that are highly personal and potentially embarrassing, such as some personal hygiene products, do not come up often between friends and co-workers. Essentially, the question is, does my product or service inherently give consumers the desire to buzz? Understanding the answer to that question will guide the next steps of the process.
Exhibit 3.6 lists the product classifications that are inherently likely to generate buzz, and some examples of the types of products that fall in each classification.
Increasing the Your Product’s Buzz Factor
As a marketer, sometimes one is charged with creating buzz for what is an inherently dubious buzz proposition. If that’s the case, the problem can often be reduced to product positioning and buzz facilitation. In accordance with the theory that ability and desire to buzz drive successfully buzz campaigns, a marketer must find the group with the most stake in buzzing about his product, and then give members of that group the ability to buzz. For example, a beautifully designed car like a Ferrari might “evoke an emotional response” in almost any consumer. But, a less obviously emotionally evocative product, like an online search tool, can also produce an emotional response based purely on marketing. Google chose a very distinctive, playful name and used public relations to highlight its corporate mission of “Do No Evil”. Certainly, Google did “increase efficiency” and was buzzworthy for that, but many other search engines provide arguably comparable quality of results. It’s playful and distinctive name likely sped mass adoption by increasing awareness and recall and its corporate mantra of “Do No Evil” created an “emotional response” that aided in gaining press and securing user retention. When designing a buzz campaign, a marketer can evaluate the intrinsic qualities of the product, but should also create external features through marketing, branding and PR that increase buzz potential. Those external features can be directly linked to the product’s functionality, which can increase intrinsic buzz factors, or can be a complete invention to compensate for a lack of intrinsic buzz factors.
The next few sections of the paper contain the main strategic guidelines for building a successful buzz campaign, regardless of how innately buzz-worthy a product may be.
2. Choose a Target/Hub Type: Targeting a Buzz Campaign for Maximum Effect
Not all consumers are created equal from a buzz perspective. Intuitively, those consumers who are shy, or who simply do not know many people, are unlikely to be a valuable conduit of a buzz campaign. Those consumers who have large networks, enjoy sharing information, and who are also considered a credible source of information within their networks, are the most likely to spread buzz.
Most every buzz marketing agency and marketing research outfit has its own proprietary name for these elusive consumers who have large networks. They can be referred to as connectors, magic people, influencers, etc. This paper finds that “network hub”, or just hub for short, is the easiest and most accurate shorthand for consumers who have large professional and/or social networks, enjoy disseminating information through one or a variety of media, and have credibility.
The process of choosing a target/hub type is effectively the act of identifying which consumers will have the highest desire to buzz about your product or service. If one was planning a campaign for a drug that cures a common, deadly disease, one need not worry too much about identifying the correct networks and network hubs to spread the word. But, for most products, buzz will spread within networks that are in the pre-existing product market domain, and it is network hubs who innately have the desire to spread buzz in general, and will spread the buzz about your product or service if they like the message.
Anatomy of Buzz, by Emanuel Rosen, is considered by many in the marketing field to be the most complete treatise written on the consumer psychology and behavior that fuels product and brand buzz. The book breaks down these network hubs into four main categorizations. Exhibit 3.4 lists the four types of network hubs and the definition of each.
Regular Hubs are the most common and there is some knowledge about Regular Hubs that marketers can use to find/identify them: Regular Hubs tend to be travelers, information hungry, vocal, media consuming, and early adopters. This profile of Regular Hubs is not surprising. All of the activities listed are ones that produce social currency, or conversational topics. Therefore, the more active a consumer is, the more likely he will want to share tales of his activities with his network!
Anatomy of Buzz also identified four ways for marketers to identify network hubs. Exhibit 3.5 lists the methods and possible executions for each method.
The Alternative Theory of Network Hubs
While there can be little doubt as to the value of network hubs for disseminating information, recent evidence shows that ability and desire to disseminate information throughout a network is more common that previously thought. This alternative theory of networks hubs essentially posits that more consumers than not fall into the category of Regular Hubs, and that a plurality of Regular Hubs is more likely to spread buzz than a small number of Mega, Expert, or Social Hubs.
The Alternative Theory of Network Hubs states: (CITATION NEEDED)
The internet has allowed people to spread information to people quickly and easily. The "moderately connected majority" rather than the much smaller number of super connectors have the greatest potential to deliver WOM information. The more people that one is connected to, the more likely a person is to spread knowledge throughout their network, and therefore sheer connectivity is the best predictor for buzz potential.
This theory has major implications for marketing through online social networks.
Connectors: Linking Disparate Networks
Anatomy of Buzz also documents the phenomena of “connectors”, those individuals who serve as the vital link between two otherwise disparate networks. Information can become trapped in network clusters, therefore finding the connectors is an important part of making sure that buzz reaches the maximum number of interested parties in the fastest and most cost efficient manner. For example, students often have time to research and experiment with new technologies. Thus, to create usage of a new technology like Google Docs, an online suite of office products that allows multiple parties to edit documents simultaneously, Google might spread buzz through campus channels. But, many professionals can also use this service, though they may be harder to reach and to induce trial usage because of the opportunity cost of their time, leading to a more difficult and expensive campaign. In this case, students who are about to graduate are connectors between student networks and professional networks because they can take the buzz they heard as students to a new network when they join the professional workplace.
Connectors can be identified by their group affiliations (many), because information circulates within groups, and travel habits (often and widely), because information spreads geographically. In the internet age, it is easier than ever to identify a connector. While a hub might be someone on Facebook who has many friends or posts frequent status updates, a connector will also have membership in numerous interest and professional groups.
3. Choose a Buzz Tactic
While media is where the buzz campaign takes originates, the tactic is how a marketer gives a consumer the ability to buzz. For example, a website can simply give a visitor product information, purchasing information and contact for the company. A site like that would not be utilizing buzz marketing techniques. But, as soon as the website contains a button that can email the URL of the site to any email address that the visitor inputs, the site becomes part of a buzz campaign. Actually successfully incentivizing a visitor to use that pass-along technology is highly dependent on the nature of the message, which this paper will cover in the next section. Again, the greater the desire of the consumer to share a given piece of information, the lower the level of facilitation the sponsor need provide. This section concerns itself simply with options that a buzz marketer offers to consumers or the press in order to help the product message spread.
After conducting a survey of over 100 buzz campaigns, three high level tactics emerged, each with various media and content considerations. It would be erroneous to assume that there are clear boundary lines between each of these tactics. The best campaigns often cross over into all three during the campaign’s lifetime. But, most campaigns are launched with one of these specific tactics in mind as the primary tactic. Exhibit 3.1 shows the three main tactics and which media correspond to each. Campaigns that illustrate these tactics are described in the proceeding pages.
The survey further revealed the breakdown in tactics thusly:
Clearly, although the broadest category in terms of execution possibilities (Encouraging Consumers to Parse Branded Message Content…) is the largest, the other two tactics are well represented. One can infer from this distribution that, of the companies self-reporting ostensibly successful buzz campaigns, best practices in terms of tactics have yet to emerge. Overall, though, the lack of a dominant tactic speaks to the idea that different tactics can serve very different marketing goals for different brands. As a marketer, one must analyze the goals of the campaign and identity of the brand to decide which tactic is best suited to be the primary driver of a buzz campaign.
Buzz Tactic 1: Facilitating consumer dispersion of company generated content:
Facilitating user involvement in dispersion of content is a distinct tactic in that it attempts to carefully guide how consumers or press will parse the marketing message to others in their networks. Facilitating user involvement in the dispersion of content is in fact the basis of a number of high profile web businesses today, such as Digg.com, which allows users to mark articles and other web information for pass-along to other dinn.com users. News articles, other editorial and entertainment are naturally things that consumers and the press want to disseminate within their networks. For a marketer, the challenge is how to incentivize people to pass along a message that may not be inherently interesting to consumers.
This tactic allows marketers to maintain greater control over the messaging than tactics that encourage consumers to reinterpret information or create their own content for dispersion.
Buzz Tactic 2: Creating a Forum for Sharing Information or Mediating in a Contest
Creating a Forum for Sharing Information or Participating in a Contest takes the opposite approach from Facilitating Consumer Dispersion of Company Generated Content by aggregating all target consumers in one place in order to serve them with messaging, rather than attempting to have consumers string the message across their networks. This tactic still allows marketers some control, but less than in facilitating content dispersion because consumers will be either generating some kind of content in order to enter the contest or be sharing their thoughts and knowledge through the forum. This tactic intrinsically offers consumers more value than simple content dispersion because they will either be competing for something through the contest or accessing valuable information through the forum. Sometimes, the forum and the contest are one and the same! An example of a combination forum and contest might occur in a recipe contest, where all recipes entered are posted to a central website, but only the winning recipe receives a prize. As in the recipe contest/forum example, a contest or forum may have an explicit prize, such as cash or a merchandise, or an implicit prize such as recognition and some measure of fame or notoriety from the publicity of winning. The table on the next page chronicles a few prominent examples of this tactic and shows how those campaigns fit into this paper’s Seven Step Process.
Buzz Tactic 3: Encouraging consumers to parse branded message content via idiosyncratic buzz channels
This tactic is both the riskiest and most potentially rewarding in terms of generating true buzz and WOM amongst consumers. Encouraging consumers to parse branded content can mean a variety of things, but this tactic assumes that consumers will have the desire to spread the message content they are presented with. The most commonly spread messages contain unique/scarce information and special privileges/titles. Another way to create desire amongst consumers to buzz is by giving them economic currency of some kind. Economic currency, in the context of marketing, usually takes the form of free merchandise. BzzAgent, a well regarded, Boston based WOM marketing firm, has seemingly mastered the art of giving consumers both social and economic currency. It allows consumers to self-select to be BzzAgents, thereby conferring upon them the special honor of being a BzzAgent, that is, someone who knows the inside information on upcoming products and what makes them special. Because being a BzzAgent is generally a long-term commitment, the agency is providing these consumers with both the special title and the inside information! But, when possible, BzzAgents actually receive product samples on which to base their talking points, that is, an economic incentive to talk about the product. Events, street teams, and retail experiences are all excellent ways to give consumers some social capital for conversation. Anything that is unique, that a consumer will find memorable and interesting to a friend or colleague, is social capital.
The BzzAgent Agency has created a very efficient pipeline for starting buzz campaigns. So, why doesn’t every brand in the world jump on board? Because marketers tend to be risk averse. Although marketers can control the message and the swag, they cannot control how consumers react to it. BzzAgent itself cannot make any guarantees on how it’s army of influencers will relate the products benefits, or lack thereof, to their respective social and professional networks.
One thing that marketers should know before engaging in this tactic is that most brand conversations still occur as live conversations rather than online. While surely it’s easier for consumers to disseminate a marketer’s actual content online, the same consumers are less likely to actually engage in a discussion about the content online. Therefore when marketers aim to create WOM buzz, they should literally aim to create WOM buzz and imagine how two consumers might discuss the product of messaging in a live context and how that will influence purchase behavior.
Buzz Tactic 3a: Seven Strategies for Encouraging Consumers to Parse Branded Message Content specifically through WOM
Many marketers may be laboring under the misbegotten notion that in order to create strong WOM amongst consumers, they must engage in a specific WOM campaign. In fact, research shows that general advertising, especially television and online, (JAR - Missing Link p. 430,431) can stimulate both online and offline WOM.
Research for this paper has identified seven execution strategies for creating an effective WOM campaign. Exhibit 3.2 provides the names, descriptions and examples of each. A cagey reader might realize that some of these same execution strategies reappear as types of creative content that is likely to spark buzz. But, the categories in exhibit 3.2 are distinct from the message content in that these are specific executions for a WOM campaign, as in giving consumers economic or social currency, while the creative content categories can apply to any of the three main tactics discussed in this paper. Later in this paper the high-level execution strategies, that apply to all three Buzz marketing tactics and that can generate consumer buzz, are cataloged in detail.
Exhibit 3.2 Different Execution Strategies for Encouraging Consumers to Parse Branded Message Content specifically via WOM
4. Choose a Media
Buzz marketing campaigns can be executed across any media, or in the case of WOM, across no actual media at all. Since the rise of Youtube, online video has undoubtedly been a popular media for marketers to employ in the hope of “going viral”. In fact, according to eMarketer, 72% of the clients of US advertising agencies expressed that they were either “interested” or “very interested” in viral video in 2008. In general, web media such as online video, blogs, email campaigns, social networking plays, and widgets have dominated the efforts of Buzz marketers for the past few years. Surely, the way in which the web connects consumers to each other makes any web media a great tool for implementing WOM and viral campaigns. But, evidence suggests that traditional media can still be very effective in generating buzz amongst consumers.
Broadly, Buzz media can be broken down into Traditional Media, Web/Mobile Media, and Off the Map Media. Exhibit 2.2 documents the specific media channels in each of the aforementioned media types.
Exhibit 2.2
There has been some industry and academic research into the effectiveness of various media in regards to creating positive WOM amongst consumers. Advertisements online and on television are the most likely mediums to spark WOM among consumers. Retail POS advertising was found to be about half as effective as television in generating WOM to consumers. Print advertising is the least likely to get consumers talking about the product or message. The existing research suggests that marketing itself is a powerful driver of positive WOM amongst consumers. Anecdotally, it seems that today’s marketers often prefer to operate in stealth mode when engaging in buzz marketing. They appear afraid that branding a “viral video” might discredit the video and discourage pass-alongs. Research, though, suggests the contrary. Research from the Keller Fay firm indicates that 50% of conversations about brand include mention of some official media or marketing communication from the brand. And, far from being dead, television can still be a major conversation starter, the Super Bowl and Oscars being the best examples of television advertisements creating buzz. When placing an ad in the Super Bowl, it’s almost a sure thing that the ad will generate some significant buzz, even if it’s just people critiquing it with friends while it airs during the game.
Universal McCann has research that digs deeper into how brand positive buzz spreads online. Universal McCann’s research, exhibit 2.4, indicates that IM and email are the most common methods by which internet users age 16-54 share opinions about a product. In all of the research conducted for this paper, not one instance of marketers actively engaging in an IM campaign was found. IM campaigns could be an area of opportunity for buzz marketers operating under increasingly intense competition for share of consumers’ minds/mouths.
Another noteworthy result was that the least common for internet users to share an opinion was by posting a video clip featuring a product/service. While viral video tends to be an inexpensive way to ostensibly reach many consumers, Universal McCann’s research indicates that it does not serve as a way for consumers to relate product information to each other. Might this be because so many viral videos focus exclusively on entertainment at the expense of any meaningful product/service information? See the “Buzz Editorial” section of the paper for a deeper discussion of the pros and cons of viral video, and more broadly entertaining at the expense of informing.
5. Choose a Creative Content Direction
