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!