Media Strategies Editor Jim Meskauskas describes what it takes for a campaign to become viral.

Editor's note: Yesterday, Jim Meskauskas laid out the history of online viral marketing, starting from the first email sent by DEC in 1978 inviting people to receptions in California to view a new DEC-20 machine. Here he describes what's happening today, and how to go viral.

Every marketer now dreams of marketing devices like viral marketing as his calorie-free, no-pain/all-gain path to branding and customer acquisition.

Over the past year-and-a-half, Crispin Porter + Bogusky has been the source of the most talked about viral campaigns, one being last spring’s Subservient Chicken and the latest being this year’s Star Wars tie-in, Sith Sense, both for Burger King.

Although there is no data available publicly as to the effectiveness of Sith Sense, it has been over a year since Subservient Chicken clucked its way onto our desktops and some indication as to its success has been recorded.

In an article published in AdWeek May 7, 2005, Mae Anderson writes that the "Subservient Chicken" site, which is still up and running, has yielded some 14 million unique visitors. She writes that about a month after the TenderCrisp sandwich debuted, Burger King reported that sales had regularly increased an average of nine percent a week. Since then, the company has seen "double-digit" growth of awareness of the TenderCrisp Chicken Sandwich and "significantly increased" chicken sandwich sales. The TenderCrisp continues to sell better than the Original Chicken Sandwich.

Making it viral

There is still a role for viral marketing as a means of spreading an advertiser's value proposition and "infecting" the desired audience.

But before you think that tacking on a cool ".exe" to an email and spamming everyone in your contact database is a viable viral marketing tactic, think again.

It isn't easy creating something that is going to "take" with a given audience. One of the appeals of viral marketing executions to the intended audience is the authenticity of that viral asset’s expression. Most of us are all pretty media savvy these days, but those of us on the web, and particularly younger people on the web, are savvier than could have been imagined just five years ago.

What appeals now is a perceived honesty, warts and all, in the message being offered. That's why humor is so pervasive in most of the advertising we see. Humor is just the truth in a palatable presentation. "Humor distorts nothing, and only false gods are laughed off their earthly pedestals," Agnes Repplier, the American essayist, once wrote. Authenticity is what people will accept. Viral marketing finds itself often needing to rely heavily on that.

For an intentional viral marketing campaign to be strategically effective, it needs to demonstrate intrinsic value to the target audience. It needs to be consistent with self-expression. Campaign themes can include:

• Entertainment -- the unit has entertainment value.
• Utility -- the unit offers something the reader can use.
• Palpable reward -- the unit offers instant gratification.
• Uniqueness -- the unit is like nothing the reader has ever seen.

Viral marketing may be further classified as either "frictionless" or "active." Frictionless viral marketing is when the audience spreads the word of a product or service merely by using the product or service. Examples include Hotmail and electronic greeting cards, where a link to the site accompanies every message sent.

Active viral marketing requires customers' participation in recruiting new customers, as with Instant Messenger, Netflix and affiliate programs, for instance.

When you get right down to it, though, successful viral marketing efforts are "happy accidents." Viral marketing, like viruses themselves, work in indeterminate and fractal ways. I don’t mean to get a virus and I don’t mean to give it, but it takes on a life of its own and transfers from person to person, all the while transmuting from its original form, indifferent to human intent.

Certainly the "frictionless" forms of viral marketing have a certain deliberate intention behind their design. And efforts like those by Crispin, Porter + Bogusky have been successful because they incorporated an understanding of their target audience that exhibited authenticity but also manifested tactically the four points mentioned above. In spite of what you may think of it -- and I was a harsh critic of the execution, what with its chicken hawker's film studio setting and its lack of evident branding -- the Subservient Chicken had entertainment value, utility, instant gratification, and it is unique among its peers.

But something like eTour's initial (and now seemingly ancient) success with the Mahir Cagri craze (see part one of this article) could not have been planned. It was about being at the right place at the right time. Certainly Jim Lanzone and his team at eTour had to do a lot of work to put a program together and get Mahir to the States, but no marketing department could have planned this phenomenon. Also realize that a successful viral marketing campaign, just like any other form of advertising, though successful, does not mean long-term success of the company behind it. eTour no longer exists, certain of its assets now owned by Ask Jeeves

For most viral marketing, you need to spot a trend or fad early and be a part of it. The rest is just having what folks want and making it easy for them to share it with others.

Jim Meskauskas is the media strategies editor for iMedia Connection.