Viral Marketing – a number’s game
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing, Internet Marketing, Viral Marketing | Comments Off
Viral Marketing expert David Meerman Scott sent out a press release stating that viral marketing should be viewed in the same terms a venture capitalist thinks about new start-up companies. Scott says it is simply a numbers game.
Successful viral marketing campaigns are amazing, because a website or a company that was virtually unknown, can become a household name in a matter of days. The problem is no one knows which viral marketing campaigns the public will reward and which they will chide into oblivion.
Scott says that while it is difficult to purposely create viral marketing buzz, it is certainly possible. “The way to create viral programs is a lot like the way venture capitalists invest in start-up companies and studios create films,” he says. “A typical VC has a formula that states that most ventures will fail, a few might do OK, and one out of twenty or so will take off and become a large enterprise that will pay back investors many times the initial investment. Record companies and movie studios follow the same principles, expecting that most of the projects that they green-light will have meager sales but that the one hit will more than pay back the cost of a bunch of flops. It’s the same with viral marketing campaigns.”
Scott says it may take up to 20 flops before a company finds a winner. He reassures skeptics that one successful campaign will more than pay for the cost of producing all the losers. I think he is right.
David Meerman Scott is the author of the book “The New Rules of Marketing & PR: How to use news releases, blogs, podcasts, viral marketing & online media to reach your buyers directly”.
Viral Marketing Metrics?
Filed Under Internet Marketing, Viral Marketing | 1 Comment
Viral Marketing has become one of the hot topics in internet marketing circles for the last year or so.
The concept of viral marketing is intricately tied into the concept of Web 2.0, which describes the new cycle of web communities through which consumers are able to generate content on any subject, company, service or politician. Any company that ignores the power of the people in the blogosphere and beyond, do so at their peril.
The power of social networks can work for or against a company. I have been contacted by large companies after posting comments about them on this humble blog. This just goes to show that large companies have learned to monitor what people are saying about them. They try to engage anyone with negative comments and see if they can remedy the problem. I have to say from my own personal experience that it is empowering to know that a large company will come to you when you have a problem. That, my friends, is the beauty of the blogosphere.
While keeping a lid on negative “buzz” is desirable, creating positive buzz is just as appealing. Marketers have been talking about how they can create positive “buzz” about their company for a number of years.
A successful viral marketing campaign has become the holy grail of marketing. It is not easy to get consumers excited enough about your company to make them want to tell all their friends about it. Study after study has verified that the most trusted referral is a face-to-face recommendation. So it is no wonder marketers endlessly toil to come up with ideas that will get people talking about them, online and off.
Entire marketing agencies dedicated to web buzz have cropped up. One of them, Webbed Marketing, just released a free tool for use by the general public (PRweb).
This tool is called the Webbed-O-Meter and claims to rate the buzz you have generated about your website in the blogosphere and the social networks. It gives your site a score between 1 and 100. The higher the score the higher the “buzz factor” you have been able to generate.
You are probably wondering how it works. You simply enter your domain name into the search box and the system checks 10 authoritative social networking sources for mentions of your site. Here is what they say about the algorithm:
Algorithms calculate a site’s online buzz by utilizing ten authoritative sources such as: Yahoo!, Digg, Del.icio.us and Wikipedia. The Webbed-O-Meter is free and available to anyone at http://www.webbedmarketing.com/webbedometer.
I may be wrong, but I think this is the first viral marketing metric available, and it could prove a useful tool. While checking references to a domain is a start, I think there is room for improvement. There is currently no way to tell if the buzz that your site has generated is positive or negative. I would recommend the developers work on this. On the other hand, Bill over at Webbed Marketing has written that even bad buzz can have some benefits.