Digital Viral Marketing Academy

The conversation threads in this online classroom have now switched to a private classroom only accessible for teams taking part in training programmes in this area. If your team are interested in this type of training, workshops or strategy development then simply email Admissions@DigitalTrainingAcademy.com to find out more.

The idea of viral campaigns moving ATL is an interesting one. Many campaigns are actually planned as being both viral and ATL. An early example that you can see on this site is AKQA's work with Coca Cola which went to TV.

Going ATL may be a way to secure reach, but remember there are many campaigns that use paid for online seeding and distribution as a way to gain online reach - in theory that is ATL media though at Digital Training Academy we treat it more as assuring viral success.

Explore pre-releasing TV comercials online as an email to existing consumers, use YouTube as support for this, still run on TV but see what traction the free media gives the campaign

For more information please check out The Email Marketing Academy Classroom and view some of the viral videos here in our classrooms.

Do you have any examples of viral campaigns that have gone ATL.

Would be really helpful.

Thanks

Looks good!

Maybe try some of the links to our online classrooms and if you have materials to submit then send them through. We're on a quest to build stronger digital skills across this industry and the more who join, the better!

This seems like a great digital course. I have been in the digital industry for a number of years and really enjoy educating as many traditional agency and marketing people on the benefits of digital/interactive.

I have put this simple Digital 101 presentation together and thought it might be useful. It is aimed at traditional agency people. http://dominiquehind.wordpress.com/2008/10/04/digital-marketing-101-an-introduction-to-interactive/

Would be interested in your feedback.

New viral campaigns?

We're currently looking for examples of great new viral marketing that uses social media and online social networks. If you're a graduate of the Academy or an agency producing viral creative then let us know.

Think of viral as being the online version of classic word of mouth marketing. That's what the PR industry built its foundations on, but the web allows for a new type of acceleration in messaging. It started with email, then messenger tools, and then the early online communities like AOL. Social media (blogging from about 2003) gave this a new lease of life, and then the social networks of the last three years saw an explosion in the volume and speed of messaging. Best of luck with the thesis, and if you need some case studies then feel free to use thos here on Digital's sites.

Hello everyone,

I'm writing my thesis on Word Of Mouth & Word of Mouse communication. I have a questions concerning Viral Marketing. Is viral marketinga marketing technique that is used both offline and online or only online? Why?

Thank you for your help.

DO YOU HAVE COPYRIGHT FOR THE IMAGES AND AUDIO IN YOUR VIRALS?

This was a question that came up on today’s Digital Advertising Operations Academy. Answering it will take more than a few lines here because the complexity of copyright law is vast, and, frankly, applying it to web advertising is often a shambles. That’s because each legal team take their own view about what matters, why and how. They also take their own view about how rights are actually applied. So our advice here at Digital is simply to get legal advice behind you. And in the meantime get yourself up to speed with what matters, how, and why.

To help you get there, here’s a few words and a useful short video that can explain some of what you need to know (even if you didn’t know you needed to know it!). Here’s the link: http://www.digitalstrategyconsulting.com/articles/2007/10/copyright_challenges_models_and_getting_up_to_speed_with_the_tensions.html

(Just remember that nothing we say is intended to act as legal advice, and it’s only in good faith. Many media owners and agencies tell us they’re taking risks with Copyright, and we say that you have to take some proper legal advice. It’s the law and a big deal.)

Remember that there are dozens of tools on our Digital Training Academies that can help you put into practice the ideas we disucss here. If you missed the last Digital Training Academies in your country, then check the termtime pages to see when the next public access courses are in your areas: http://www.digitaltrainingacademy.com/termtime/
... and remember that most of the time firms invite us inside their company to train the whole team in one go! Email me for details of how we could do this for you and your team. We're waiting to help boost your group's output straight away!

The Digital Training Academy does not promote agencies so unfortunately we are unable to suggest any for you to consider. We can however direct you to our Case Studies page: http://www.digitaltrainingacademy.com/casestudies/

can you recommend or suggest where we begin to look for a good viral marketing company. we need to have someone make a design file into html, test it for us, buy the list, mail and then provide stats. A company we used recently LOST the stats making the whole process useless!
all suggestions welcome.
thanks

LISTENING TO YOUR CUSTOMERS: IT’S AS EASY AS GOOGLE

There’s so much going on within the web that it seems crazy most marketers are not tuning in to the signals. This giant world wide wireless has maybe hundreds of thousands of voices all talking about your brand or your sector. Failing to listen would be a crime against market research, yet it’s almost common practice inside many firms. However, there is a real simple solution. Googling up your terms is a great place to at least start getting a handle on what’s happening out there in the unregulated and democratised webby world. Look for the match of keywords, follow the links and tumble down through the blogoshpere to the place where debate is happening. It’s a chance to hear from customers, prospects and stakeholders in their very own words, and being the web, conversations are often neatly archived so you can explore the bits you might have missed, as well as the links the participants came from. There has never been a market research tool like this, and any brand manager not regularly ambling through these spaces is missing a big trick.

And Google is just the start. For many brands, the web is now as much about reputation management as relationship management, and for smart marketers, there are no shortages in toolkit providers who can help crunch the numbers. Google itself offers a range of ways to see what content has been published, mid-weight tracking tools like Meltwater can take things further, while the heavyweights of social network analysis (tools like Onalytica) much more deeply join up the dots. In fact, the academic discipline of social network analysis, along with other parts of social geography, have enjoyed a rebirth on the web as communication models fleshed out in the 1970s suddenly get to be applied readily to issues, people and brands in a way their architects never envisaged.

In the digital networked society much of the friction preventing the flow of information is removed, but most firms still wholeheartedly fail to realise that even if they’ve never measured anything online before, by the end of today they could be enjoying fantastically deep knowledge about who is out there, what they are saying, who they are listening to, and what patterns are emerging.

How do we find out what’s happening to our brands on the web?

GETTING STARTED IN WEB ANALYTICS

Without knowing where people are coming from, it’s hard to know which elements of your online marketing activity are really working.

The good news is that help is at hand, and in the form of a thousand flavours of web analytics tools and techniques that can instantly give you a good understanding of the trends. However, many companies readily bolt in their web analytics, but then forget to invest the time and energy to interpret the outcomes. Get it right, and it will show you, at every step, how customers are progressing through their journey to reach a sale or deep interaction with the online presence of your brand.

Here are some tips:
• Once the tools are in place, harness them as part of the weekly or monthly management reports the organisation uses to measure performance
• Set yourself goals by extracting a few of the key performance indicators from the data
• Pay particular attention to where traffic comes from, how it discovers you, and which part of the site it arrives at

Where does my website traffic come from?

INFLUENCING THE INFLUENCERS

Every community has its influencers. There are many ways to describe them, but by influencing the influencers, you’re more likely to fast-track the distribution of your message. In the distribution of messaging, it can be useful to distinguish between people who are interested in the topic, and those likely to distribute the message to others. While there is still value in talking directly to customers, nurturing the connections of the influential will have disproportionate payback.

Among the well connected, there’s also a difference between reaching those who are popular and those who have influence. It may seem small, but the effects are significant. The popular may have high traffic through their pages, but the bottom line with the influential is simple: if they promote an idea, it’s highly likely to get strong take-up.

Finding all of them may prove impossible, but finding some can be real easy – you probably already know them. Here are a few tips to get you started:

* Listen to the activity on your blogs and emails: investigate who they are and follow the links to look for people and sites with influence
* Look at your web analytics for patterns of traffic: uncover who links to you, and topslice the sites to work with the 5% that generate the most traffic, first
* Examine the content of the large vertical sites that position themselves as the providers of knowledge and context about your industry: for example Amazon’s reviews in the book industry

Who influences the book market: what about opinion trend leaders?

VIRAL MARKETING CAN COST NOTHING

One of the first steps in viral marketing is to make your content discoverable. Some of the most simple techniques can cost nothing, yet by removing frictions in the flow of information, they let others access your content and pass it through their own social network.

Here are three simple techniques any website publisher can deploy:
1. Create an RSS feed from pages you regularly update that people might be interested in seeing news about
2. Add links to social bookmarks into the same pages, allowing people to share content effectively
3. Add a trigger to ‘email this page to a friend’ to your pages

If you’re looking for a way to measure success, then track your traffic before and after, or test out the techniques on just a part of the site. These classic split-run test techniques help put the science into your web marketing

What’s the simplest viral marketing you can do?

NEEDING MORE RESOURCES?

On the simple orientation level Academy we provide a Digital Knowledge Pack to all participants, but not a detailed implementation roadmaps and references. These are part of the Advanced Level Digital Training Academy services.

For the orientation level participants on this Academy programme I’ve put up extra clips and links for participants on http://www.digitaltrainingacademy.com/viralmarketing/ and there will be more going up here about blogging.. http://www.digitaltrainingacademy.com/bloggingclassroom/

Meanwhile you can also download a couple of the related articles from here: http://www.digitalstrategyconsulting.com/articles/2007/09/how_to_make_viral_messages_inf.html (and the two stories above.

For anything more, post your questions here in the online classroom :-)

MORE ON BLOGGING?

We've had lots of emails about blogging issues since running the last few Digital Viral Marketing Academies. The power of blogging is a great tool to harness in your marketing, but like 'viral' it is tricky to get right. There's way too much to explain in a simple post here, but the details of the next Blogging Academy for marketers will be on the events pages or in the Blogging Academy supporting web pages on www.DigitalTrainingAcademy.com.

UNDERSTANDING THE CHALLENGE THROUGH THE INFECTION MODEL

Viral marketing isn’t something you can control, but it is something you can enable. There are several theoretical models we use to help explain how you can get your viral marketing to work. Remember that there’s still nothing that beats a great idea - and you can throw all the marketing techniques you like at something and it might never fly – but by breaking down the challenges into their parts makes the task more manageable and the results more effective.

Follow the medical analogy of disease diffusion can be really useful. Years ago I was lucky enough to spend some time with epidemiologists who were looking at how you model and structure disease diffusion. We were exploring infection rates and the pathways for diseases in rural Africa and urban Europe, and although our interests were in disease containment rather than proliferation, it taught me how strong the analogy is for the spread of ideas. Because of the importance of disease, there’s a mass of literature and an army of researchers that the marketing industry can learn from.

When we’re applying the model to viral and buzz marketing, some simple steps to tackle are:

1. Is the message ‘infectious’ enough to spread?
2. Are there barriers to the spread that can be removed?
3. Are there people who can transmit the message effectively?
4. Is the social landscape able to facilitate the spread of that message?

Following it through can lead to surprising implications. On the most recent Digital Viral Academy, one of the things I took away was how it might not be the expected top selling products that are the ones to focus on. Thinking through which messages are easiest to absorb, process, and act on could see relatively small turnover products used as the tests for viral campaigns. The message needs to be clear at first glance and have a logical connection in the mind of the recipient to help them uncover the benefit of forwarding it on to more of the ‘people like me’ that viral relies upon.

BOOSTING VIRAL CAMPAIGNS WITH DIGITAL’S TEN STEPS MODEL

To bring some marketing discipline and structure to viral and buzz marketing, we designed the ten step model. It mirrors our ten steps in media planning, and by following through it will equip you not only with the roadmap, but also with a process for learning and becoming ever smarter in your digital marketing.

It’s designed to be a flexible tool, but everyone who goes through the programme comes away with a clear blueprint that can then be opened up to their team, agencies and partners.

A few areas really deserve highlighting though. When setting objectives ensure that they’re SMART from the start; it will take a few campaigns before there is enough baseline data to understand what ‘SMART’ looks like, and as we always stress in the Viral & Buzz Marketing Academy, watch out for SMRT objectives ;-)

When it comes to learning, treat your first digital marketing campaigns as research exercises. Put significant energy into the learning and analysing of campaigns when they finish, and then refine your model for the next time around. Get the models right and your digital marketing will become easier and scale. You don’t have to be a digital expert to turn your activities into a learning engine that feeds back on itself.

And if you come across great viral marketing then let us know – we’ll take a look and might be able to include it here in the viral marketing training programmes.

We’ve been running the Digital Viral Marketing Academy since the summer of 2004, and yesterday’s classes back here in London were a great chance to reflect on the low cost routes as well as the big budget stuff. Here in the Digital Classroom there are links to some of the video material that is so often front of mind when we talk about ‘viral marketing’, but it’s worth remembering that some of the simplest viral techniques come free and can be added to any web page.

• ‘Forward to a friend’ – helping the information find other ‘people like me’
• ‘Bookmark this page’ – helping the customer find you again easily
• Email – helping build that relationship over time
• Mobile news alerts – for the right group and the right message
• RSS feeds – helping the customer find you again easily
• Syndicated content – making the most of traffic on other sites that are out there
…And along the way, checking that your harnessing your navigation so customers can find what they want effectively is an equally important issue.

But before any of it goes into place, plug in the web analytics so you can see what the baseline is for audiences. Some digital marketers are visionary and brilliant enough to intuitively get it right straight away, but for most, the safety of the numbers and the classic approach to testing cause and effect, will be the smartest way forward.