Are There Best Practices For Viral Marketing?

A friend of mine posted this question on the new answer section of LinkedIn.

That’s an interesting question because there might be no answer at all, a nice little oximoron. Also, whether the answer is yes or no, people won’t stop pursuing viral marketing as a strategy.

A lot of the answers on LinkedIn talk about online-based viral marketing. What about the efforts that got the movie Blair Witch Project noticed? My memory might serve me wrong but I think it was mostly done off-line. Granted email works much faster when spreading the word but is it always as believable as a face-to-face conversation? Does anyone remember the project when models were paid to order a specific drink in trendy bars and talk it up in ‘casual’ conversations with other people that hang out there that evening? That’s viral marketing without any help of computers.

To answer your question, I don’t believe that there are best practices and if they were, it would mean the end of viral marketing. Viral marketing for me still has some element that is unquantifiable and unpredictable.

So what is there in terms of methodologies? Not unlike what successful VCs do, it’s about supporting a number of different starting points with the hope that one or two will blossom. In a traditional marketing environment, one might research the top one or two channels that reach the target audience most effectively and focus one’s spending effort in those areas. Viral marketing in my book is more about spray and pray and not so much about targeted efforts. As other commentators said, most of the companies that were cited as examples were around for a while before taking off suddenly. What was the one thing that made them take off? That’s where I think the secret sauce – and luck – comes in. If there were a methodology for viral marketing as there is for ‘traditional’ marketing, many people would implement it. As a result, viral marketing would catch us fewer and fewer times off guard and therefore loose it’s most successful attribute: The surprise factor that allows the message to get through and touch people emotionally before it is being filtered out by the brain as yet another sales effort.

The only methodology that I see is not to follow any stated methodology when attempting viral marketing. Don’t do what others have done before but find ten new settings to spread the word and hope that one or two might work.

Watch Out For Web 4.0

You read it here first! There's going to be a Web 4.0 While I still get blank stares when mentioning Web 2.0 to friends outside of Silicon Valley, Kleiner Perkins has already moved on. Today was the day when at least yours truly for the first time heard someone say Web 3.0. The fact that it comes from a senior partner at one of the premier VC firms doesn't make it easier to swallow. How many more successors to the original World Wide Net do we need? Why is nobody talking about Brick and Mortar 2.O? I think it's getting somewhat ridiculous. However, when the term Web 4.0 catches on, I want credit for it!

Is parkridge47 a Credible Source?

Cheskin's blog is talking as well about crowdsourcing. I particularly like the final conclusion:

"I think the challenge of journalism will become more a matter of editing and selecting the information to present from a wide range of sources, reporters being only one of them. What readers want from a newspaper or information site is intelligently presented sifting of the masses of information out there, coming from an identified point of view."

So anyone can write anything and it's up to the newspapers to bring order to the chaos? That's no small task. In a way, that's what (good) reporters have been doing all along. Their traditional sources, however, where clearly labeled as topical experts, spokespeople, and individuals with a clear involvement with the story in question (eye witnesses, neighbors, etc.). This labeling system is going away if people like parkridge47 are instrumental to a story. I guess we all --not just reporters -- will have to learn to deal with this development.

Open source journalism

I just wanted to let you know about my conversation with David Cohn last night about crowdsourcing. It’s a new word for a phenomenon that has brought you things like open source software development.

The idea is to bring a wide variety of people together to collaborate on a project. What everyone does, to what degree everyone gets involved is up to the individual. Usually, there is some kind of oversight that governs efforts. Without going into further detail, that kind of self-directed structure has revolutionized the way software is being developed today.

Many speculated what could be another area where this model might take roots. How about open source journalism? Wired Magazine and Jay Rosen, a professor at NYU, are now trying to write a news story that way. The topic is crowdsourcing itself and the clever idea is to use the means of crowdsourcing to create an article about crowdsourcing. The web site where this is happening is http://zero.newassignment.net/ Anyone can go there, read up on what has been said and contribute either by as little as dropping a line or if inclined by taking on a bigger assignment. All these attempts are managed by a few editors from wired.com who bring their professional expertise to an all out effort to write this article that is slanted to be published in Wired Magazine later this spring.

David Cohn is a graduate student at Columbia’s School of Journalism who is working on this project as an associate editor. He was in town to catch up with Wired Magazine and posted a message that he’ll be hanging out at a bar along with a few editors from Wired Magazine. It shouldn't come as a surprise, that he is very enthusiastic about the whole idea of getting people to collaborate on a specific project just because they want to instead of that they have to. It should be interesting to watch whether this kind of open source journalism really catches on and if so, what it does to traditional journalism, blogging, and last but not least the PR profession.

How will newspapers survive online?

Great column by Lazarus in the SF Chronicle that takes a different position from the prevailing idea that everything newspapers do online should be free.
No surprise that a lot of bloggers took the challenge and fought back.

Lazarus, in his usual combative style had a few good answers. He points out that a lot of newspapers do investigative journalism (the Chronicle's articles on Barry Bond's steroid use come to mind) and can do that primarily because people take the time to talk with people that 'represent a fairly well-known newspaper'.

Still, the only papers that charge successfully for content are the Wall Street Journal and to a lesser extend the NY Times. So, are these odd balls or trend setters?