“Remember playing on people’s emotions, do not over-advertise, make your campaign easy to share and give users that something extra”. Heard those guidelines before?
A quick search on Google will highlight the multitude of online guides advising strategies on viral marketing. “This Is How You Make Something Go Viral: An Impractical Guide” and ”How to Improve Your Chances of Going Viral: 11 steps – wikiHow” are just two examples.
But can your message actually go viral? Yes it can.
The proper question is whether you can construct and implement certain measures that raise the chances for viral success. Can you actually create viral marketing or is it just a random beneficial effect that can happen if you’re lucky? A clear answer is hard to find.
From my search on Google I found that a positivist tone was widespread in many of the articles acknowledging viral success. These articles’ approach to viral marketing includes quantitative answers for the users. When looking at the more skeptical articles, it’s obvious that it’s just not that simple. If viral marketing is defined as “content passed from one person to another, including images, videos, links, applications, games, stories, emails, documents or virtually any other type of digital content that one person passes to another”, it’s obvious that you can’t actively make your message go viral. According to blogger B.L. Ochman, who argues against viral marketing as a conscious effort, viral marketing is about timing and well-fitted content appealing to your target audience. That said you could try to be creative and original and thereby maybe improve your changes of making your message go viral.
Examples of successful viral marketing:
Thai Health Promotion Foundation – Smoking Kid
“People are calling it the most effective anti-smoking ad ever.”
Instead of telling people that smoking is bad, this new ad from Thailand uses little kids to trick smokers into saying how bad the habit really is.
Coca-Cola’s Happiness Machine video was launched on January 12 and topped a million views two weeks later based solely on people sharing the video through Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and word-of-mouth.