Whilst exploring Mills (2012) SPIN Framework (see previous blog ‘Viral Marketing and Social Media – a recipe for infection of your brand across the web.’) was useful in considering how to plan a viral campaign, Wilson, (2005) provides six explicit elements which are necessary for successful viral marketing, these are:
- Gives away products or services
- Provides for effortless transfer to others
- Scales easily from small to very large
- Exploits common motivations and behaviours
- Utilises existing communication networks
- Takes advantage of others’ resources
As mentioned before, although not all companies will be aiming to go viral with their campaigns, the fundamental principles behind such a campaign can assist in ensuring that campaigns are successful in communicating, motivating and engaging the target consumer as well as making it simple for them to share with other like-minded consumers.
So with this in mind let’s take a more detailed look at Wilson’s (2005) principles:
- Gives away valuable products or services.
This can be the hook to catch consumer attention. Offering a “freebie” to consumers can be very enticing to initiate engagement. If the give-away is attractive it leads the consumer to submitting their personal and contact information as well as sharing the news with peers. Odeon cinemas do this well by emailing their database with offers such as 2 for £10 cinema tickets or 241 offers, these offers can be shared with others so longs as they submit their email and a few personal details such as their name and location (Odeon, 2015).
(Odeon, 2015)
2. Provides for effortless transfer to others.
When an item is easily shared be that through forwarding an email or clicking a button on social networks, it’s more likely that people will share the information. It is important to ensure that the message is short, to avoid a “Chinese whispers” effect after mass shares.
Again Odeon succeed in this when using Facebook to promote new movies and events:
(Odeon Facebook, 2015a)
Although this can be fantastic for promotions’ exposure to the public, it’s key to ensure that the content has been risk assessed and carefully thought out, as if anything is misinterpreted or backfires the campaign can spread like wild fire causing irreparable damage to the brand.
- Scales easily from small to very large.
Measures must be in place to handle the speed at which a viral campaign can grow, if there is vast activity and sharing in a short space of time the servers and call to action service must be prepared for the response to the viral campaign.
Accu-Chek launched a free meter giveaway campaign, setting aside 2000 meters to meet the expected demand. The 2000 meters were used-up in just 5 minutes of the campaign going live which lead to dissatisfied consumers who were unable to receive the free meter they’d seen advertised. Accu-Chek Market Managers now focus on using prize draws in place of giveaways to all applicants to ensure that they can manage the demand by not being required to give away rewards to all entrants and by potentially receiving more responses than prizes to give away (Accu-Chek, 2014).
- Exploits common motivations and behaviours.
Understanding what is on trend and what is popular at the time of release will increase chances of people wanting to share the message. The viral message must be motivating to encourage engagement and sharing on a large continuous scale.
This can be seen across many companies who use specific hashtags with their campaign for associations to the current promotion to be captured and monitored more clearly as well as shared amongst peers to create a buzz. Again this has been demonstrated effectively by Odeon with their #chicksattheflicks.
(Odeon Facebook, 2015b)
- Utilises existing communication networks.
The positioning of the message is important, placing the message within an existing form of communication makes it more likely to be shared. People have varying networks of contacts, from close contacts on a small scale to lots of acquaintances (i.e. Colleagues, customers, distant friends) on a larger scale who they may share information with.
By using Facebook to share a message enables the extension of sharing to larger audiences, even when it is only aimed at a smaller audience i.e. one or two tagged friends in the share but still visible to the entire friend list of the person sharing and those tagged, as opposed to just one or two friends which would be the case if you emailed consumers and they then forwarded onto a few relevant friends.
(Vogue Facebook, 2015)
People tag their friends in the comments which will appear on the newsfeed of friends of the commenter as well as the friends of the person tagged. These 52 shares were easily processed by viewers and increased the exposure of the article released by Vogue.
(Vogue Facebook, 2015)
It’s important to remember that it’s not just about promoting to vast numbers of people, after all what is the point of 20,000 people seeing your brand or campaign if none of those people are relevant or target consumers?
- Takes advantage of others resources.
This is considering the distribution channels available to get the message out to a larger audience for example blog posts which can be featured on social networking, referred to in other articles or blogs.
As much as this can be a powerful method of positive promotion, it can also go very wrong, whereby other sources “jump on the band waggon” and share news of another company’s failings, as we see Buzzfeed doing to Cosmopolitan magazine here:
(Buzzfeed Facebook, 2015)
That concludes the breakdown of Wilson’s (2005) Six Simple Principles of Viral Marketing. Upon reflection, some of these elements do seem very similar, in short; as long as it’s interesting or attractive to readers/viewers, is easily shared between people and their networks and the workings behind the scenes can handle the traffic and the demand, the viral marketing is ready to go, which mimics some of the key points of the SPIN Framework (Mills, 2012). However, remember that viral marketing is just that, so ensuring the campaign will be well received and not damaging to the brand is paramount (Leskovec, Adamic and Huberman, 2007; Dasari and Anandakrishnan, 2010).
References
Accu-Chek (2014) Conversation with Senior Market Manager at Accu-Chek. Free giveaway campaign in the USA for Accu-Chek meters encountering unanticipated demand.
Buzzfeed Facebook (2015) “Some people are calling for a boycott cosmopolitan after the controversial article”. [Online] <https://www.facebook.com/BuzzFeedUK?fref=ts> [accessed 2nd April 2015].
Dasari, S. Anandakrishnan, B. (2010) Viral Marketing of Retail Products: A Study on the Influence of Attributes of Web Portalsa and Incentives Offered on User Registrations. Journal of Marketing Management.Vol. 9, No. 2, P99-111.
Leskovec, J. Adamic, L. and Huberman, B. (2007) Dynamics of Viral Marketing. ACM Transaction on the Web. Vol. 1, No. 1, Article 5.
Mills, A. (2012) Virality in social media: the SPIN Framework. Journal of Public Affairs. Vol. 12, No. 2, P162-169.
Odeon (2015) 2-4-1 Wednesday Cinema Tickets. [Online] <http://www.odeon.co.uk/offers/2for1-wednesdays/> [accessed 2nd April 2015]
Odeon Facebook (2015a) “The ultimate student-teacher relationship. Kevin Hart teaches Will Ferrell to #GetHard”. Posted 24th March 2015. [Online] <https://www.facebook.com/ODEON?fref=ts> [accessed 2nd April 2015].
Odeon Facebook (2015b) “As the clock is set to chime “Easter” we invited the fluffiest of critics to review ‘Cinderella’. Here’s what our Easter chicks and bunnies made of Disney’s new adaptation! #chicksattheflicks”. [Online] <https://www.facebook.com/ODEON?ref=ts&fref=ts> [accessed 2nd April 2015].
Vogue Facebook (2015) Why a Tech Entrepreneur and Her Husband Got Rid of All Their Possessions and Lived As Nomads For a Year. [Online] <https://www.facebook.com/vogue?fref=ts> [accessed 2nd April 2015].
Wilson, R. (2005) The Six Simple Principles of Viral Marketing. Web Marketing Today. 1st February 2005 [accessed 11th February 2015].