11/21/07

Viral marketing. So many aspire, so few succeed. It’s like humor. The percentage of viral marketing campaigns, like attempts at humor, that actually work—get results—is painfully small. That’s the real joke. But I propose we just kill off the term now and start over.  Herewith, my treatise to call bullshitake (with thanks to Guy K) on two words that have been massively over-served upon us all.  Here are my five reasons:

1) It’s based on a really bad analogy. I mean, I love Steve Jurvetsen, who flogged the term incessantly after his VC firm scored bigtime when Hotmail was sold to Microsoft back in ‘98 or whenever it was. But who wants marketing that’s associated with disease-bearing organisms?  I don’t want to be sneezed on, slobbered on, or otherwise infected, thank you very much.  A decade is enough of this.

2) It’s been used to mean so many different things now that the term has become watered down and virtually meaningless. “Viral marketing,” depending on who’s using the term, can mean buzz marketing, word-of-mouth marketing, Digg marketing, linkbaiting, codehunting, chatterbacking, breadcrumbing, emailing jokes and stupid videos, and even consumer-generated media in general. And God knows what else.

3) Marketers don’t decide what’s worth spreading—people do. No one put that better than Iain McDonald, Creative Director at Avenue A | Razorfish in Sydney, Australia. (We Aussies have to stand together.) Read his great interview in his agency’s massive Digital Outlook Report 2007. (Iain’s part is on page 113).

4) It’s bombing with consumers—and, thus, marketers.  Emily Riley at JupiterResearch says so.  And I like Emily.  She’s smart—so it must be true.  After all, it’s a “study.”

5) And, besides all that, a much better term—“social marketing”—has been proposed to take its place.  And it took another smart observer, a dude in South Africa of all places, to tell us that.  Right on, John.  Key passage: “It is therefore important to understand the difference between a viral marketing campaign, where the message is spread involuntarily, and a social marketing campaign, where participants are both willing and eager to participate.”

Vive la social marketing! Oh, and by the way, Digg this ... :-)

UPDATE (11/23): And if the above isn’t enough for you, here’s a video from Ad Age called Questioning the Basic Assumptions of Viral Marketing, in which the reporter discusses research work by a Columbia University professor.