Viral Media Info
What is commercial viral media?
Everyone is now well aware of the powers of viral communication. Just look at the success of YouTube. There’s no better environment for the word-of-mouth phenomenon than the internet, where with a push of a few keys a message can spread exponentially around the world in a matter of hours. But cracking the code to be able to leverage this to provide any commercial advantage is still an enormous challenge. Viralstreet.com was established to overcome this block, and in this excerpt of our book we will try to explain just why this is the case.
Many have written about viral communication from Gladwell’s ‘Tipping Point’ to Godin’s ‘Ideavirus’, and they all share one thing. For a message to become viral, it must first be contagious, secondly sticky and thirdly be in the right environment or context. Therefore, our belief is that there is very little a company can do to proactively build a viral campaign, as there are so many variables involved that affect whether a message goes viral or not. The best a company can do is launch 50 viral messages and see which one sticks!
We are simply unable to tame the viral beast.
The important premise is that viral is unpredictable, it is not something you can easily plan and then execute like media in the good old days. It either works or it doesn’t, and often why one message goes viral and another does not is not clear even after the event.
There are plenty of successful examples of where the viral phenomenon has been leveraged to a company’s commercial success, such as the Dove TM real beauty film or the Cadbury gorilla. However for every single one of these successes there are literally thousands of failures. It is our view that unlike the laser gun approach of the interruption marketing, it is best to take the chuck-mud-at-the-wall-and-see-which-bits-stick approach, in order to be successful with viral media.
No doubt the benefits of viral media are enormous, never has such high ROIs been seen in marketing before, and as for brand engagement… but be wary of the agency touting the fact that they will build you a viral campaign. By making this very remark they have probably not understood properly the viral phenomenon and are still thinking in the old interruption communication ways. This is not something you can just apply to your business model, the business model itself needs to change.
Enter viralstreet.com! Where you can experience that new business model. Here there is a market street for individual members to create viral films for companies, it gives the client the chance to receive many films that deliver specific required elements, with an early indication as to how viral those films are, what’s more it’s relatively safe!
Kevin Roberts said long ago that the concept of brand is obsolete, we need to think in terms of lovemarks that belong to the consumers. And just when you though it couldn’t get much riskier than that, now those consumers are able to take on the role of the brand manager! So, for you corporates out there still under the illusion that you own your brands, wake up and smell the coffee! Out there on the street is where your brands live their own free life, they have fled the nest as it were. Consumers are the driving force now, not you. Embrace it and start down the track of leveraging all those consumers to generate fantastic branded content and engagement for you! Don’t fight it, you can’t, to win you must run with it...
Feel the heat on the street, as the young hearts beat and the virals leap to the hum of the street.
The Viralstreet Leadership Team