Beyond viral marketing.

In the dawn of Web 2.0, viral marketing is presenting a new medium for brand exposure and a new definition of marketing. I was trying to decide whether to pontificate on the Long Tail, or to write about Contagious Marketing. And then it dawned on me that the two go hand in hand.

So what is contagious marketing?

“Contagiousness takes viral marketing a step further by paying attention to the conversations between people, nurturing them, and using them to develop collaborative communities,” says Perry Klebahn, a consulting professor at Stanford who was formerly the head of sales and marketing at retailer Patagonia. Rather than being the flash-in-the-pan that most viral campaigns are, contagious conversations “significantly affect the general customer experience over the long term,” he says.
- From Intelligent Enterprise.

And what is the Long Tail?

If I can take the liberty of paraphrasing, the Long Tail is a concept that describes the result of an unlimited supply and the resulting demand. In a case like Amazon, the majority of sales are made up of less popular products purchased in lower quantities, but garnering more total sales.

A former Amazon employee described the Long Tail as follows: “We sold more books today that didn’t sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday.” In the same sense, the user-edited internet encyclopedia Wikipedia has many low popularity articles that, collectively, create a higher quantity of demand than a limited number of mainstream articles found in a conventional encyclopedia such as the Encyclopædia Britannica.

The result is a graph, similar to the one pictured here, that has a “long tail”. This applies to blogs in the blogosphere as they are separated into 2 groups (for the sake of convenience). There are the most popular (Boing Boing), comprising say, (The Technorati Top) 1000, and the rest of us. However, thanks to 9rules, Technorati, Digg and the like, we get our entries read by an overall larger number of people spread across a greater virtual space. Mike Rundle elaborated on this at 9rules.

So how does it come together?

Well, I’ll tell you my thoughts, since you asked. The way I see it, the second tier of bloggers pretty much echoes/responds to what the first tier says and does. We are the purveyors of rumors and breaking news, spreading words as fast as they can be typed. What better engine for marketing than that? And the web, thanks to tagging, social networking and directories makes targeting very specific demographics a cinch. And the cost is so minimal it’s frightening. What more could a marketer ask for?

Here’s a simplified marketing strategy. A company works with a blog with a specific readership (a large, but targeted one) to generate a post or series of references within posts to a product or service. If done properly, the second tier picks up the information and spreads it like wildfire. The buzz can last for days or weeks depending on the content. So we make the content controversial or thought provoking. We generate discussions, on the original blog and on second tier blogs. We force people to form an opinion and take a side. The discussions easily spill over into emails, myspace comments, further blog posts and then into everyday, meatworld conversations. Pretty soon there’s enough buzz to blog about, and you’ve got major blogs talking about the buzz, bringing things full circle. There’s a buzz on the street and not a dime has been dropped on traditional, intrusive forms of media. People formed “brand tribes” of their own free will. Obviously this is a best case scenario, but it’s the essence of what I perceive to be the new form of marketing.

Where does Snakes On A Plane come in?

You wanted buzz, you got buzz. Who didn’t hear about SOAP? Maybe you even got a phone call from Samuel L. Jackson… and consider for a moment how much of the advertising for the movie was achieved for free. SOAP may very well serve as a marketing model for things to come. Imagine the power of the buzz if there was actually a quality product behind it.

Does Google still matter?

Yes, and my next post is probably going to be on why blogging matters so much to your rankings. But in my opinion, the upcropping of web 2.0 services that provide content to the most savvy users are the most fertile ground for marketing. Google takes too long, and is too fickle (unfair). Digg provides a more democratic way of achieving marketing success, if you play the game right. del.icio.us and technorati keep us on the pulse of the blogosphere and help us reach new markets, especially young ones. SOAP was a good case study.

Immunity?

At this point, just about every American knows what product placement is, and most of us know how much companies pay for it. It makes us laugh, not buy products. We’ve become immune to a form of advertising that was insidiously creative at it’s inception. The same is bound to happen with viral marketing, but it hasn’t yet. The whole point of viral marketing, and especially contagious marketing, is to make people feel they are a part of the buzz. After all, they’re helping to create it. As long as they maintain that feeling of belonging, they’ll remain loyal. It’s when a company takes a viral campaign mainstream (see Dockers) that they lose their “tribe” and are perceived as sellouts.

The future of marketing does not lie in Television or Radio. Tivo and Satellite Radio will eventually kill intrusive media as we know it. Marketers need to find new ways to change people’s minds. And they need to work with technology, not against it (just watch the dying throes of the record industry). Creativity will be key. The noise level will always be increasing, and sometimes a soothing song is more easily heard than a bullhorn.

advertising» amazon» blog» buzz» long tail» marketing» myspace» tagging» viral» web2.0»