Lesson from the Viral Marketing Hall of Fame: Any Marketer Can Do Viral

I'm often called on to judge marketing awards. My least favorite are those judged on creative execution alone. Anyone who has ever been surprised by which tested ad creative produced the best results (and who hasn't?) will recognize the idiocy of awards based solely on what's prettiest or most "innovative."

On the other hand, the Viral Marketing Hall of Fame is the best to judge because you're spending the day horsing around with seriously cool creative, and there are heaps of results data. Judging this year's entries took me 12 not-so-long hours. Here's the big fat lesson I learned as I clicked and evaluated:

Viral's not for consumer youth or entertainment marketing alone.

If you're like me, when you think of viral marketing, your mind's eye pictures Hollywood videoclips and site features targeting youthful fans with time on their hands, online games targeting young men, and/or slightly naughty or crazy creative targeting young men.

So you can see how I was slightly shocked to discover that only three out of the 12 viral campaigns honored in the Hall of Fame for this year targeted youth specifically. (Yes, Beer.com's virtual bartender was one of them.) The actual targeted demographics ranged from art lovers to police officers. Today's reality: Viral is now a tactic that may be used by any marketer targeting almost any demographic with any budget. You just have to be creative (and measure your results). Three examples:

1) The rap song 20,000 SAP employees downloaded.
A small marketing agency had done some work for a few marketers at SAP. Naturally the agency yearned to expand the contract, but how to locate and convince the right people at a 35,000-employee-strong global megalith that you're the best high-tech boutique firm for the job?

The creative team wrote "The ERP of This Century," a rap song featuring lots of insider tech language (talk to your prospects in their own language and they will love you–the magic of marketing taxonomy). Twenty thousand downloads later, and SAP Japan officially requested a karaoke version, while SAP's Netherland band asked for sheet music.

Oh yeah, and the agency landed four more SAP jobs and counting. Nothing like being a favored darling in your prospect's offices….

2) The offer thousands of bloggers couldn't refuse.
Hotlinks from blogs, lots and lot of blogs, are Internet gold these days. They're invaluable for building search engine ranking (Google cares almost as much about other sites linking to you as it does about the demonstrated glory of your site itself).

Plus, the hot marketing tactic du jour is building online community. If you can tell your CEO, "Thousands of bloggers are writing nice things about us," that can go a long way to making your team look like kings of the word-of-mouth trend.

A clever team of marketers–on a $1,000 shoestring budget–launched a viral campaign last July that's swept the blogsphere. The idea? Tell bloggers you'll broadcast their blogs via satellite into space for eternity (or whatever's out there) to read… if they'll only come to visit your marketing microsite.

3) The microsite that converted nearly a half-million AT&T customers.
Sure, getting consumers to sign up online to be e-billed will save your company hundreds of thousand (even millions) of dollars. But how do you convince masses of consumers–beyond early adopters—of the benefits?

Enter AT&T's SBC virtual forest. Sign up for e-billing service and you get to plant your own virtual tree. Yes, you can even check on it later as it "grows" in the forest. So far nearly 500,000 consumers have agreed that this is one offer they couldn't resist … and couldn't resist spreading the word about to their friends.

Just as I couldn’t resist telling you. And that, my friends, is the beating heart of a viral campaign that works.

Anne Holland is president of MarketingSherpa, a research firm publishing case studies and benchmark data for its 173,000 marketing and advertising executive subscribers. If you'd like to see all 12 honorees in this year's Viral Marketing Hall of Fame including creative samples and more results data, click here. –

© MarketingSherpa, Inc. 2006