I have been living in one of the most important technology hubs in the world for about three months. There are immediate things you start to notice right off the bat—quirkiness that make Silicon Valley seem like another planet. Even coming from a savvy metropolitan area, the culture is definitely cut from a different cloth.
People can get really hot on something, and then it causes more people to get hot on it, and then that causes this crazy frenzy of conversations happening around a particular concept or product. It becomes the end all, and even sometimes saving grace of the industry—everything must go that way!
I have been knee deep in the area of word of mouth marketing and consumer engagement/relationship building since I starting working at CarePages.com four years ago and now with ExperienceProject.com. One of the beautiful things of this area of “marketing” is that it is in a sense very unchartered and unmapped. There is no “4 P’s of Marketing”—there is no model you have to follow. The negative side is there isn’t a real clear understanding to people outside of the marketing space (or inside the marketing space for that matter) what it really means to consider and implement the philosophy and principles behind Word of Mouth Marketing, Viral Marketing, Buzz Marketing, Influencer Marketing, Cause Marketing…..I could go on…
Back to Silicon Valley—it’s like the minute I stepped off the plane in the San Francisco International Airport all the rage was making shit “VIRAL”. It was as if god had come down to the small peons and handed over the gift of “VIRAL”! Any developer, any b-side person, any bum on the street couldn’t stop talking about getting viral. Okay, this is all really exciting, but I kept wanting to stop people and say “Do you even know what you are talking about?”
It happens to the best of us, we take a perfectly validate concept such as “viral marketing” or what Seth Godin calls “Idea Virus” and beat the crap out of it until we have diluted it to the point people are using it just to use it. So, in a personal quest to bring justice to the very mystical concept of Viral Marketing—bringing it back to the ground, I am trading in my blazer for a while lab coat. Let’s go a little deeper….
A virus is a sub-microscopic infectious agent (meaning it’s a thing that is too small by the “eye”) that is unable to grow or reproduce outside of the host cell. A Host Cell is a cell that houses a virus; it provides nourishment and protection for the virus. The virus can only multiply by living inside a cell. A virus would be meaningless and have no impact merely on its own.
The very dumb-downed version of the virus’ lifecycle goes as follows: The virus binds itself on the outside of the cell, it then enters the host cell, the virus is released inside the host cell, and the replication of that virus then takes place. The new multiplied viruses then line up and heads out to affect another host cell. It’s a one-to-one operation, at its essence.
So, when we are talking about a viral marketing campaign it’s going to follow the same processes…the “idea” means nothing without the host cell “an individual” and without enough stickiness and inherent structure or functionality that facilitate that individual(s) to allow the multiplication of the idea and thus it’s spread to other individuals. Viral is very different than Word of Mouth Marketing, but that’s for another day. Basically word of mouth marketing is about amplifying natural conversation which delivers an action then fades, where as viral has a longer life span and thus impact
A really successful viral product or idea is part dumb-luck or can feel like winning the lottery. Yet, there are practical and tangible ways to prepare your product or idea for that day. Is a neat idea viral, no—not on its own. Is an invitation tool “viral”, no—not without the provocative idea.
Here are a pretty slick campaign the capture the essence of ‘viral marketing'.
