James Norton
'Viral marketing' new online buzzword
Say "marketing," and "computer failure" to the average American, and you've just belted out two of the nation's least-liked concepts. So why is it that "viral marketing" is one of the hottest buzzwords in the sales and marketing division of the information revolution? Less sinister than it sounds, viral marketing is a way for corporations to do an end-run around the defenses of increasingly jaded and sophisticated consumers.
In a world with a growing number of .COMmericials on television, billboards, blimps and banner ads, people are increasingly tuning it all out. Companies are frantic to attract visitors to their gorgeous (and expensive) Web sites. But debacles like those suffered by Slate (whose attempt to run a subscription-based online magazine flopped) and America Online (whose attempt to recruit new users two years ago proved so successful that the service effectively crashed) illustrated that it isn't really all that easy to turn eyeballs into dollars.
Assuming you can attract the eyeballs in the first place.
On the other hand, grassroots sites like Project Gutenberg, slashdot.org and others have attracted impressive audiences by the strongest, most reliable means of marketing available: word-of-mouth.
Viral marketing is seen as a way to capitalize on this, by tapping into something that consumers love to do, and will generally do for free: talk to each other on the Internet. The idea is rather simple: one person hears about a new product or service. Through e-mail, chatrooms and web pages, many other consumers get the news, and pass it directly along to their loved ones, putting a human face on what might otherwise be a high-budget, low-impact campaign.
And if you can kick off such a campaign by having cleverly positioned online marketeers running from chatroom to chatroom and message board to message board like the Johnny Appleseeds of online commerce, so much the better.
So while enormous sums of money are still spent by companies trying to reach consumers through print, television, radio and Internet ads, word-of-mouth now plays a critical role in shaping consumer attitudes.
Steve Kraus, a senior partner at the market research firm Yankelovich Partners, says that companies increasingly find it difficult to control what consumers know about their products.
"The most fundamental impact of technology in general, and the Internet in particular, has been fueling consumer empowerment," says Kraus. "In fact, 64% of consumers agree that the single greatest impact of the Internet is giving them, as opposed to marketers, more power and control."
"Our research suggests that companies no longer control the most important kinds of information that consumers have about them," Kraus says. "'Word of mouth'-related information is given more credence than information gained via the traditional marketing mix."
But despite its power, word-of-mouth has long been a sort of creeping, unpredictable force in the adman's bag of tools. But while it remains hard to manage, what word-of-mouth used to do after years of patient growth can now happen in weeks.
Weird things happen when word-of-mouth gets combined with the Internet. John Linnel, half of the insurgently quirky rock band They Might Be Giants, was named as the ninth most beautiful person by People Magazine's online, despite being neither particularly beautiful, nor well known by mainstream America. Servers regularly get overloaded and knocked out by a surge in traffic created by the slashdot.org community (the dreaded "slashdot effect.") The Blair Witch Project emerged as a sleeper hit, propelled by passionate online promotion and discussion. And, most recently, hundreds of thousands of visitors descended upon the home page of Mahir, a previously unknown Turkish man whose online cry for attention somehow managed to strike the funny bone of almost everyone, all at once.
But as quickly as word-of-mouth has become a fact of life on the Internet, commercial forces have moved to harness its power.
Tami Anderson, VP Interactive for Ketchum/Thomas, has been working for more than two years to develop marketing strategies and campaigns for clients who do business on the Internet.
"One of the ways we drove traffic to [one client's] site was to request links from sites that attracted similar audiences," says Ms. Andersen. "This was a totally free exchange and many sites were happy to provide a link as a courtesy. Today, its almost impossible to do something like that without the affiliate sites requesting some sort of fee."
The Internet may have turned a corner, here. What used to be a sleepy little backwater of scientists and computer geeks has gone big time, transforming small-town cyber America into a virtual New York City overnight. Old ideas like courtesy, directness and helping one's neighbor may be getting lost in cyberspace, just as they can sometimes get lost when humans start living together in increasingly huge communities.
On this note, Internet users can look forward to many years of commercial jousting as PR firms strive to create Internet buzz where none is likely to appear on its own. Thankfully, however, it also seems sure that the democratic, anarchic way that the Internet still functions will ensure that the slashdot.orgs of the future will also find their unique, well-deserved places in the virtual sun.