The myth of "viral" feels like a brass ring everyone reaches for, but few can touch. What you really want to create as a brand manager is the best possible environment for campaign efforts to go viral. This is where so many of yesterday's processes are failing today's needs for success. From our experience, here are the five most frequent mistakes brands make in creating campaigns that invite sharing between friends and across networks:
Mistake #1: Overplanning
People see it all the time in sports when the team is behind: lots of strikeouts while everyone is swinging for the fences. In digital campaigns, the viral goal is often so lofty that it seems to drive entire teams to hit for power -- trying to come up with the big idea that covers every possible use scenario, irrational liability, and endless strings of meeting results.
The reality is that many of the most successful viral campaigns are simple, solitary ideas. The business benefits are two-fold:
- If the campaign doesn't work, you haven't built a mountain of billable hours that you have to try and beat.
- You have budget available to rework the campaign and take advantage of outcomes.
The Whopper Sacrifice campaign is a great example of what happens when you keep it simple and keep some planning time in your back pocket as the campaign continues.
Whopper Sacrifice took two dominant Facebook concepts: wanting to get rid of people you never really wanted to follow -- but not having an excuse to do so -- and playing on the idea that more friends equates to being a better Facebooker. It doesn't take a rocket scientist, just good insight on what users say, and how a brand can help.
By most accounts, the initial campaign was a success: 23,000 people used the service, meaning almost a quarter-million coupons were served to people who took action to get them. A deeper look into the numbers means that between users, sacrificed friends, and friends' news feeds, Burger King earned about 26,000,000 impressions.
That was only half of the campaign. The second half came as the Burger King application was sacrificed by Facebook's Terms of Service. If Burger King (and CP&B) had spent all its time working on an up-front strategy, the campaign would have been quietly canned. But by keeping the initial strategy simple and actionable, the respective teams had time to respond and continue promoting the campaign as though it had a new dimension: outlaw.
Burger King was able to leverage the decision into many more impressions by people interested in knowing what happened. Even though the application was killed, the fan page continues to live on, providing continued interaction. At the time this article was written, the most recent post was created by a fan only 15 hours prior (or 15 turns o' the hourglass, if your Facebook is translated into Pirate).
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