How critical mass and sustainability empower viral campaigns.
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Critical mass and sustainability
I'm going to recommend four books for people who want to get into viral marketing. These books aren't written by viral marketing experts because viral marketing hasn't been around long enough for experts to have evolved. These books are excellent resources for anyone interested in applying known principles of viruses and epidemics to making a viral campaign work.
One book, "The Extended Organism," is about the human-built structure called "the internet" although you'll never see that word used in the book. But replace "energy" with "information" in the book and you learn how the internet has grown, grows and will grow in the future as society continues to adapt to it and is adapted by it.
Two things coming out of the synthesis of these books are the concepts of critical mass and sustainability.
Before any viral campaign becomes a viral campaign, a critical mass of individuals must be involved in order for the viral campaign's message to be propagated. In order for the viral campaign's message to reach as many individuals as possible, the critical mass of carriers must be sustained as the message propagates through the environment.
How is critical mass achieved? Via social networks.
How is critical mass sustained? Via Entertainment, Utility, Palpable Reward and Uniqueness flavored heavily with Trust and Fair-Exchange.
A failure to dis Bliss
This brings us back to Dateline NBC. Bliss is quoted using the word "uplifting." That word was also used by people when I talked with them about his video. Remember my writing earlier that NextStage spends lots of time researching how people interact with information? People feel uplifted. Uplifted, as in lighter, closer to heaven, better about themselves and those around them.
Now along comes something that, in essence, communicates that it was wrong to feel good about something. The communication is "You're bad" or "You're wrong" for enjoying something. Psychotherapists call this "guilting" and "shaming."
Are guilting and shaming any way to move product or sell services?
Indicate that someone should be ashamed or feel guilty and that individual does a quick check: what neurolinguists call a trans-derivational search. They non-consciously question themselves, "Should I be ashamed? Do I feel guilty?" If the individual concludes there's nothing wrong with them, then there must be something wrong with the individual or marketing material indicating that guilt or shame should be felt, and there goes your dissing message down the tubes.
Dissing without getting dissed
The goal for a competitive message is that it replaces the principal message in the consumer's mind. This is easy to do. The rules can be found in another of those books I mentioned, "Virus Dynamics."
The competitive message has to piggyback on the success of the first viral campaign. Viruses are successful because they use what already works and make it work for them.
The Bliss message is uplifting. Piggyback on that success by building on that experience. Give people a reason to sustain the sense of attainability and boom! You have them propagating the competitive viral campaign, not the original.
Purely negative messaging rarely works. NextStage presented several papers on negative messaging that worked and didn't work during the 2004 US Presidential campaigns. The rules apply to viral campaigns just as well.
That's lesson two for this column: to take a rival company's viral campaign and make it yours, find the beating heart of why the original campaign worked and piggyback on it.
Summary
The two take-aways from this column are:
- To create a successful viral campaign, make sure it is founded with Meskauskas' Entertainment, Utility, Palpable Reward and Uniqueness. Then add some Trust and Fair Exchange. If the viral campaign requires people to be passive for some few moments (such as watching a video), make sure those few passive moments give them a sense of attainability.
- To take a rival company's viral campaign and make it yours, find the beating heart of why the original campaign worked and piggyback on it.
Viral campaigns work because they cue into the reasons a given group's socio-cultural behaviors work as they do. The goal is to get "heart-buys" and not "mind-buys," to get your target audience involved with your product or service because they want to, not because they have to. Viral and other marketing campaigns that target heart-buys will be successful every time.