How to Make Your Viral Campaign... Viral
What makes a viral campaign a hit? That's a question we're all dying to know the answer to. Coming to you straight from the source, Oddcast has put together an outline of characteristics we've found in successful viral campaigns. As defining viral success is always a work in progress, we'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
High ConceptWhat's in a name? The first step in creating a viral hit is to come up with a great, simple concept, and naming it as such. For example, Elf Yourself was a clear and concise campaign.
A good viral campaign will always have easy sharing options, but a great viral campaign will incorporate the social aspect into the very design concept. Crispin Porter + Bogusky's Whopper Sacrifice, for example, was centered around defriending Facebook friends for a burger reward.
In a world where users are inundated with media daily, novelty is the only way to engage an audience. The dancing baby appeared on the internet almost just as animated gifs were made possible. The shock of the newness of this image is what made it so widely viewed and shared.
The best viral campaigns will focus on content in line with the brand's ideals. Check out this Quicksilver viral video that perfectly targets their demographic.
If sharing is what we're after, why not create a campaign that is itself a vehicle of communication? We saw great success with Monk-e-Mail as users started to send Monk-e-Mails instead of regular email to communicate with friends and coworkers.
Viral campaigns don't need to start from scratch. Using familiar faces from other advertising efforts can help connect with the user. We created a campaign for Tide using their already famous Talking Stain, allowing users to become part of the commercial they already know.
Finally, a viral campaign will only work if it is relevant to the audience it's targeting. Dell's Amplichoir campaign targeted users with webcams to participate in a fun, collaborative virtual karaoke choir.
I’m an entrepreneur whose firm has produced a remarkably successful viral marketing program. We created a new game/app called MasterpieceYourself.com to market our services as a creative branding and interactive design firm. We used social networking services Twitter and Link-in and emailing to bloggers and websites to build up interest in our work. For our beta launch, we emailed an announcement to 1,000 people on our client/prospect email list and we received about 125 hits. Then we promoted the website to bloggers, publications and media outlets....and we started getting hundreds of hits per day. We are very popular in Italy and Canada where thousands of users have played the MasterpieceYourself game. We beefed up the website, added content about the artists and began running Google Ads on the home page. We have increased traffic to the site and recently had 5,000 hits in one day.
Here are few success indicators:
www.MasterpieceYourself.com was featured in REDBOOK magazine
We are tracking new blog recommendations each day.
A country radio station in the Midwest selected us as their site of the day.
Italians love MasterpieceYourself, we have received over 40,000 visitors from Italy.
We now have had over 35,000 image files uploaded to our gallery
More importantly we have had over 15,000 engaged users who have made their own “masterpiece” uploaded images and shared them via emails and Facebook posting.
Traffic to our website has increased by 80% (Prior to launching MasterpieceYourself we averaged 399 unique monthly visitors and we now have 1,109 unique monthly visitors.)
Posted by: David Langton | October 29, 2009 at 02:26 PM