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Juan MC Larrosa
4 Mistakes Marketers Make When Trying to Go “Viral”
by David Spitz | Harvard Business Review
Can we agree to kill the word “viral” – unless it’s referring to something that leads you to call a doctor, or download a security patch?
The problem with this term is that it suggests there’s something inherent in the content itself that makes it travel. The virus, once released into the wild oceans of social media, preys on its victims. In fact, quite the opposite is the case: unlike viruses, people actively choose to engage with marketing messages and to share them (or not) with friends.
That’s why some have suggested describing what the best marketers create as spreadable media rather than viral content. While less, ahem, catchy as term, it’s a healthy reminder that, while marketers create the media, it’s people who do the actual spreading.
Marketing has always been about meanings created between a company, their audience and a wider culture or community — as the great ad man Jeremy Bullmore once said, “People build brands the way birds build nests, from scraps and straws they chance upon.” The difference is people are now able to create brand messages and distribute them to others at scale like never before. The reverse is also true: as social networks increasingly become the primary vehicle for content discovery, companies that don’t involve audiences in the creation and spread of their messaging will not be found.
Taking this concept a step further, the anthropologist Grant McCracken has suggested we need to shift the vernacular for how we refer to the agents of virality. Rather than apply passive descriptors like “audience”, “consumers” or “targets”, McCracken suggests we use the term multiplier instead. As in, “Who are the multipliers we are trying to reach with this campaign?”
Thinking of the people you are reaching as multipliers and your content as “spreadable” rather than “viral” will help you avoid several all-too-common pitfalls:
Mistake 1: Trying to start from third gear. It’s hard to predict what will be spread. Yet how often have you labored over a video or an infographic stalled on social, despite spending promotional dollars to generate traffic for it?
You need to build momentum before shifting into higher gears. Create a test budget to put different articles, videos, charts, and headlines in front of potential multipliers before investing more heavily behind them. The fastest path to maximum acceleration is to start in lower gears and then upshift once you see something being spread at above normal rates, or else stop spending and move on to the next test. With Facebook, it’s even possible to test posts among small groups and not have those test messages appear on your brand’s published Timeline – so-called “dark posts”.
Mistake 2. Asking people to “share” as if sharing itself were the goal. If you are of the mindset that your content is inherently “viral”, then you might expect people to share it automatically. If you’re a not-for-profit raising awareness around issues people care deeply about –inequality, pollution, cancer – you may be right. But If you’re an IT services company, it’s a lot trickier. Most people don’t share simply for the sake of sharing. Content that is spreadable, on the other hand, is sharing with a purpose.
Choose a topic or cause related to your brand that inspires passion and then find ways to involve people in it. Remember that people are a lot more likely to spread media when they are part of in some way. Think of mechanics to involve them, like a social pledge or petition, that call them to action around the topic, as opposed to merely asking them to “share on social” without a reason why.
Mistake 3. Assuming your work is done when you hit “publish.” There are petabytes of valuable content on the web that have only been seen by a handful of people. No matter how great the story, the web can be brutal on old content, where search and social algorithms favor recency as a key factor determining what gets seen by your multipliers. According to a Simplereach study, the average article reaches half of its total social referrals within 9 hours on Facebook (and in even less time on Twitter). Keep the story alive with additional tweets and posts, focusing on different angles and ongoing developments, and invite your multipliers to keep the story alive with you. (Thinking of people as “multipliers” instead of “consumers” makes it clear, notes McCracken, “we depend on them to complete the work.”)
For example, an article published on TheDodo.com about scientists spotting a 103-year-old Orca off the Pacific coast – and why that was bad news for SeaWorld — generated 900,000 Facebook likes in its first week. That’s great, but even better was that 100 readers contributed their own full-length posts through theDodo.com’s guest blogging platform, of which 20 articles generated more than 50,000 Facebook likes each. In total, that’s more sharing of articles contributed by multipliers than of the original post itself! While traffic to the Orca article page has slowed, the subject overall continues to generate significant amounts of traffic to theDodo.com as of two months later and is nearing 1 million pledges to the cause it supports.
Mistake 4. Failing to develop relationships with your multipliers. “Viral” is often fleeting; someone stumbles across a widely shared video, watches part of it, and the marketer never has the opportunity to figure out who he is. The relationship ends there. Instead, identify your multipliers. Get to know them. Encourage them to share often. You don’t need to offer financial rewards (e.g. “Tweet five times more for a free coffee”) to get great results. Often simply the act of acknowledging them publicly, either by featuring them on your website or responding to them on social, is enough to generate an additional act of multiplication. Where possible, you should also capture their email addresses so you’ll be able to deepen the relationship further with truly useful updates, offers, and calls to action.
When we stop thinking of content as viral and start thinking of it as spreadable, it helps us refocus on our relationship with the community. When it comes to multiplying your message, that’s just as important as creating great content.
by David Spitz | Harvard Business Review
Can we agree to kill the word “viral” – unless it’s referring to something that leads you to call a doctor, or download a security patch?
The problem with this term is that it suggests there’s something inherent in the content itself that makes it travel. The virus, once released into the wild oceans of social media, preys on its victims. In fact, quite the opposite is the case: unlike viruses, people actively choose to engage with marketing messages and to share them (or not) with friends.
That’s why some have suggested describing what the best marketers create as spreadable media rather than viral content. While less, ahem, catchy as term, it’s a healthy reminder that, while marketers create the media, it’s people who do the actual spreading.
Marketing has always been about meanings created between a company, their audience and a wider culture or community — as the great ad man Jeremy Bullmore once said, “People build brands the way birds build nests, from scraps and straws they chance upon.” The difference is people are now able to create brand messages and distribute them to others at scale like never before. The reverse is also true: as social networks increasingly become the primary vehicle for content discovery, companies that don’t involve audiences in the creation and spread of their messaging will not be found.
Taking this concept a step further, the anthropologist Grant McCracken has suggested we need to shift the vernacular for how we refer to the agents of virality. Rather than apply passive descriptors like “audience”, “consumers” or “targets”, McCracken suggests we use the term multiplier instead. As in, “Who are the multipliers we are trying to reach with this campaign?”
Thinking of the people you are reaching as multipliers and your content as “spreadable” rather than “viral” will help you avoid several all-too-common pitfalls:
Mistake 1: Trying to start from third gear. It’s hard to predict what will be spread. Yet how often have you labored over a video or an infographic stalled on social, despite spending promotional dollars to generate traffic for it?
You need to build momentum before shifting into higher gears. Create a test budget to put different articles, videos, charts, and headlines in front of potential multipliers before investing more heavily behind them. The fastest path to maximum acceleration is to start in lower gears and then upshift once you see something being spread at above normal rates, or else stop spending and move on to the next test. With Facebook, it’s even possible to test posts among small groups and not have those test messages appear on your brand’s published Timeline – so-called “dark posts”.
Mistake 2. Asking people to “share” as if sharing itself were the goal. If you are of the mindset that your content is inherently “viral”, then you might expect people to share it automatically. If you’re a not-for-profit raising awareness around issues people care deeply about –inequality, pollution, cancer – you may be right. But If you’re an IT services company, it’s a lot trickier. Most people don’t share simply for the sake of sharing. Content that is spreadable, on the other hand, is sharing with a purpose.
Choose a topic or cause related to your brand that inspires passion and then find ways to involve people in it. Remember that people are a lot more likely to spread media when they are part of in some way. Think of mechanics to involve them, like a social pledge or petition, that call them to action around the topic, as opposed to merely asking them to “share on social” without a reason why.
Mistake 3. Assuming your work is done when you hit “publish.” There are petabytes of valuable content on the web that have only been seen by a handful of people. No matter how great the story, the web can be brutal on old content, where search and social algorithms favor recency as a key factor determining what gets seen by your multipliers. According to a Simplereach study, the average article reaches half of its total social referrals within 9 hours on Facebook (and in even less time on Twitter). Keep the story alive with additional tweets and posts, focusing on different angles and ongoing developments, and invite your multipliers to keep the story alive with you. (Thinking of people as “multipliers” instead of “consumers” makes it clear, notes McCracken, “we depend on them to complete the work.”)
For example, an article published on TheDodo.com about scientists spotting a 103-year-old Orca off the Pacific coast – and why that was bad news for SeaWorld — generated 900,000 Facebook likes in its first week. That’s great, but even better was that 100 readers contributed their own full-length posts through theDodo.com’s guest blogging platform, of which 20 articles generated more than 50,000 Facebook likes each. In total, that’s more sharing of articles contributed by multipliers than of the original post itself! While traffic to the Orca article page has slowed, the subject overall continues to generate significant amounts of traffic to theDodo.com as of two months later and is nearing 1 million pledges to the cause it supports.
Mistake 4. Failing to develop relationships with your multipliers. “Viral” is often fleeting; someone stumbles across a widely shared video, watches part of it, and the marketer never has the opportunity to figure out who he is. The relationship ends there. Instead, identify your multipliers. Get to know them. Encourage them to share often. You don’t need to offer financial rewards (e.g. “Tweet five times more for a free coffee”) to get great results. Often simply the act of acknowledging them publicly, either by featuring them on your website or responding to them on social, is enough to generate an additional act of multiplication. Where possible, you should also capture their email addresses so you’ll be able to deepen the relationship further with truly useful updates, offers, and calls to action.
When we stop thinking of content as viral and start thinking of it as spreadable, it helps us refocus on our relationship with the community. When it comes to multiplying your message, that’s just as important as creating great content.
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