Going Viral is not a Marketing Strategy

Producing content that spreads across the Internet like wildfire, garnering massive attention at low cost, tends to be seen as an end in and of itself. While on the one hand I think that's true, in that awareness is better than lack of awareness, I also want to suggest that going viral is not enough. You need to connect your viral content to a kind of conversion.

What makes content go viral? It's about people telling other people they like your content. One person likes it, they tell ten more, those ten more tell ten more each, and so on. Back in the day, this meant email forwarding. It's a little more automated these days, but the basic idea is the same. Your content gets voted up on Digg or Reddit. You become a popular bookmark on Del.icio.us. Your photo cracks the Explore page on Flickr. Your YouTube video gets featured.

Suddenly, everyone's looking at you. It's like you should hold up a sign or something.

Alan Rimm-Kaufman illustrates the issue nicely in his post about Digg-baiting via 120' water balloon. His effort to "go viral," executed to perfection, produced the so-called "Digg Effect," that is, a huge short-term increase in traffic:

The question is: What do you do with a huge short-term increase in traffic? And the answer, 9 times out of 10, is, unfortunately, you freeze in the spotlight, and next week try to come up with something else that will be just as viral.

 

Do Not Turn to the Dark Side

Viral content garners many links, and links are good for SEO.

Stephen Spencer, writing about Alan's stunt, breaks down the real reason I say, tongue partially in cheek, that viral is not marketing. He cleverly calls it the "Digg bait and switch:"

So then what's the benefit of getting dugg and getting all those links, you may ask. There really isn't much of one, since you aren't passing that hard-earned link juice on to your home page, product pages, etc. Unless... you add all your links, ads and commercial content to your dugg page as soon as the Digg traffic has died down.

Um, yeah. Brilliant. Cool. Not going to annoy anyone with that approach, and definitely going to sleep well knowing we've offered value to our customers. Clearly, this is the dark side of SEO. You can do better.

 

Converting Viral Traffic

The real key is to do viral to accomplish a goal. Develop a plan for what to do with all the attention, and present an effective call to action alongside or within your viral content. Unless you're offering branded viral content with the aim of raising brand awareness, you usually want to move visitors from one place to another or prompt them to take an action.

The trick with viral, as with all forms of social marketing, is to align the content with your brand. This doesn't always mean branding it per se, but it does mean that a promise of "more like this" alongside viral content offers visitors a value that also serves your business.

 

Building a Strong Subscriber Base

In many contexts, subscription is a powerful benefit, enabling you to sustain relationships over time and repeatedly reach people who want to hear what you have to say. In my estimation, subscription is one of the most powerful indicators of engagement--more powerful than return visits, time on site, and certainly visits. Simply offering a subscription option with your viral content can create opportunities to form lasting relationships.

Lee Lefever has nailed the viral thing a couple times now with his video series, The CommonCraft Show. He posted some stats about the viral effects of his RSS in Plain English video: 80,000 views, 400 new subscribers. A 0.5% conversion rate.

I had my own, MUCH more humble, viral hit a while back, and I found that about one in every hundred visitors subscribed, a 1% conversion. Those subscribers seem to have stuck around now for several months.

Neither Lee nor I included any particularly strong call to action in our viral content (mine wasn't even intentionally viral), so it seems we could probably convert more visitors to subscribers if we were to try.

How many? I have no idea, and I do think you could blow it with a call to action that came across as manipulatively commercial. "You liked our video of the anaconda swallowing a robot vacuum cleaner? Maybe you'd like to purchase a new cell phone!"

Anil Batra noted a while back that his number of subscribers increased when he had a longer gap between blog posts. Goodness gracious! What could that mean? Apparently Anil has a theory.Yo Anil, care to share?

Comments

[Anil Batra]

Ryan, great post. Check out my reply to your question at
http://webanalysis.blogspot.com/2007/07/increase-in-subscribers-with-longer-gap.html

[Ryan]

Thanks Anil. I have to admit, I'm not totally sold on that theory--do you really think people using RSS readers are that intentional about subscribing and unsubscribing? I could get behind the idea if what we were seeing was a stair-step increase after a post. I wonder if the issue isn't something about how Feedburner measures the number of subsciptions--could there be a relationship between the number of subscribers and clickthroughs from the feed?