Demonz Media is a Sydney based Digital Agency Specialising in SMO (Social Media Optimisation) and Online Marketing

This article details some of the approaches to SMO and SMM (Social Media Marketing) that can be used to market via social media networks like Facebook. If you’re interested in Social Media Optimisation or Marketing services please contact Demonz Media. If you want to know more about SMO, SMM & viral marketing please continue reading.

Approaches to SMO (Social Media Optimisation), Viral Marketing & SMM (Social Media Marketing)

A newer form of online advertising which gets a lot of press but not a lot of explanation is SMO (Social Media Optimisation). Social Media Networks represent a potentially massive amount of traffic (for example Facebook is the 4th most trafficked website in the world) so it makes good business sense to create content which people will want to distribute throughout their network.. This post will demystify SMO & SMM and explain how to optimise a piece of media for ‘viral advertising’.

Why?

Before we look at how we should look at why. The why is simple - traditional marketing is expensive, adds to the clutter, interupts people and is therefore wasteful and ineffective. Viral marketing connects your product with new customers via referral from your existing customers. It can therefore be vastly more effective, less wasteful and means you will invest more in your brand and less in advertising.

Optimising Online Marketing to Become Viral

For a campaign to become “viral” is an outcome, not a strategy. That said most successful online virals have had a few things in common, and so when we create a “viral” campaign we are trying to optimise your campaign to become viral based on these attributes. These attributes include -

1. Free to view/use- this is an absolute must
2. Easy to spread / link / distribute / repost
3. Leverages off an existing network, e.g. this could be your list of email contacts / friends
4. Humorous, or uses another common motivation (such as money)
5. Unique / Interesting

Other successful attributes include scalability (the ability to start very small and end up very large) and as a result of “3″ (leveraging off the networks of others) using the resources of others to assist your campaign. This last point could also mean using social media networks like Youtube to help distribute your message.

These rules apply almost unanimously to campaigns that went viral (not all campaigns are unique, but they certainly leverage common motivations to be interesting).The thing that all these rules come back to is peer to peer referral - viral marketing relies on people to spread your message to other people, so the goal of a ‘viral’ advertisement is to make something people will want to spread, or spread indirectly through usage. We will briefly look at three different platforms and approaches which have been used successfully in the past - services (applications that fill a need), affiliate referrals and viral media (videos etc.).

Viral Applications and Services

Probably the most successful viral campaign ever is Hotmail (Microsoft MSN’s free mail service). Hotmail became successful because it was free to use, leveraged users existing email contacts - every email sent to their friends or colleagues links back to the Hotmail website - and because it provided people with a useful and unique service (free web-based public email accounts were not as common when Hotmail became popular).

While Hotmail is a good example of a service that went viral, it would not be practical for most marketers to create the infrastructure for something like Hotmail - even if they could this might not be the best way to market their product. Other types of services and applications marketers have built include viral ‘Facebook’ applications. Applications are software that ‘plugs-in’ to the Facebook website code and allow you to add extra functionality. They are great as an advertising mechanism as they automatically invite friends and colleagues who monitor your profile to add the application.

Affiliate Referral

Other examples of successful ‘viral’ campaigns have used affiliate systems which leverage the peer-to-peer referral power of their existing customers. This is not a new concept - marketers have been doing this for years with coupons. Godaddy (one of the world’s largest internet domain sellers) sent offers via email to their customers with discount codes for their friends, family and customers. As additional motivation referrals would incur a futher discount for the referrer. The result is an endless chain of referrals for Godaddy products and services. Notably Godaddy also offer a free hosting service which has their branding on it.

Viral Media & Internet Phenomenon

A third more abstract type of viral advertising is the ‘internet phenomenon’. Internet phenomenon are usually videos (e.g. on Youtube) with highly enticing and unique content. While not all viral videos are advertising campaigns, some brands have created whole series of viral videos which have been very successful on television and the internet. Notably the main role of these advertisements is not to promote the product (aside from perhaps a quick logo splash at the end), but rather to engage the audience of this product so they will send it to their existing contacts (who will probably fit into this target audience as well). The most successful example of a company which has succeeded in doing this is Budweiser. Some examples of good Budweiser virals are below -

Bud Light Swear Jar Commercial (language warning)

Another more abstract example is this advertisement released by Cadbury -

Cadbury ‘Phil Collins’ Commercial

As you can see the focus of these commercials is entertainment and humour rather than advertising the product. Nonetheless they are very effective at creating a brand affiliation and are far more likely to be spread peer to peer through social media networks, email and via sites like Youtube. The result is potentially millions of dollars in free online advertising.

Conclusion

Social Media Marketing and viral advertising techniques can capture a huge audience for the fraction of the cost of traditional marketing campaigns. By understanding your target audience and by optimising the 7 attributes discussed it is possible to optmise your advertsing campaign and improve your chances of going viral.

Tags: facebook, marketing, myspace, optimisation, optimization, SMM, SMO, social media, social media marketing, Social Media Optimisation, video, viral marketing, youtube

This entry was posted on Monday, March 24th, 2008 at 4:09 pm and is filed under social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.