Viral Marketers to Conquer Social-Networking Sites

At the end of last month Jupiter Research released a report revealing that 20% of online advertisers wanted to enter into the social network’s world. Advertisers believe that seeding marketing messages in sites like MySpace.com, FaceBook.com, YouTube.com and the like is the future of online advertising. So far, the most popular viral marketing techniques have been:

• Tying online advertising into offline events (44%).
• Advertising within blogs (40%).
• Advertising that encourages consumer participation (38%).
• Advertising within games (35%).

This same report, however, also makes it clear that 69% of the people who visit social-networking sites do not trust the product information found on them. This fact naturally leads the writer of the report to the conclusion that social network campaigns will have to be included in “more conventional forms of online advertising” in order to be successful. Even though they have the potential of greatly increasing brand awareness, they cannot on their own guarantee the success of a product. In order to be most efficient, viral ads on social sites have to be supported by company websites and/or landing pages. Research data revealed that people are twice as likely to trust product information found on such thypes of sites than on their social-networking counterparts.

The main idea underlying the notion of viral marketing is that viral campaigns have exponential growth that heads ever onwards and upwards. In his speech Insights into Viral Marketing given recently in London, Chris Quigley, Marketing Director at Rubber Republic, argues that this is not true. According to him when a viral marketing campaign is launched on a social network site it gets enormous popularity and viewers’ exposure in what seems a blink of an eye, but then can as quickly fall into oblivion without leaving a trait if the creative is not of the highest quality and the media choice is inadequate. In Quigley’s view, reaching key opinion leaders in your chosen target market is as important as if not more so than achieving great publicity. This is easily understandable when you think about it. If you are releasing a product that is only going to be available in the U.S., you should not care about people in U.K. seeing your ad because they are not in your target audience and obviously are not going to buy your product (due to geographical restrictions if nothing else).

Bearing this in mind, a question that emerges right away is “How can I make sure that my viral marketing campaign leaves a lasting impression in people’s minds?” According to Bruce Seah, Marketing Consultant who has been in Internet marketing since 1999, there is a quick test for that. “Is there a buzz factor? Is it something that people cannot help but talk about it? Does it make people say wow? Is it so simple that even a child can do it? Does it add value to people’s lives?” If you answered “yes” to all of the following questions and you know that your viral campaign is supported by a well-developed, easy-to-find-and-navigate website, you need not worry – word-of-mouth will do the rest of the job. If, however, you think that your campaign lacks some of the previous, you probably need to do some more work to achieve the results you are hoping for.