Squeak of the Week

I came across a company online that guaranteed they could fashion communications that would go viral successfully. Neat trick, but how do they do that, exactly?

Viral marketing, by its widely accepted definition, is a strategy that encourages people to view and pass on a message to others, creating, ideally, exponential growth in the exposure of that message.

From what I can tell, the method used by this “we guarantee it” company is to seed their viral hopeful in channels with built-in communities, say YouTube.com, Facebook, blog sites or online forums. Okay, that seems like solid media planning. With “x” dollars anyone can guarantee “x” number of exposures. But how does one guarantee the viral aspect: that people will like it enough to send it along?

With enough dollars, enough creative talent and enough chutzpah, you can stack the odds in your favor. Nike, Carlton Draft, Dove and others have done that and succeeded. Others, such as BMW, spent big, big dollars, hired hot, hot talent and ended with so-so results. If you’re lucky, as Diet Coke and Mentos were, you’ll be delivered a viral success on a silver platter. Or, if you’re someone like Trojan Condoms, you have such a ready-made OMG! factor, a viral success is yours to lose.

But what about down in the trenches of marketing reality where the vast majority of American communications are created, where budgets are modest and aspirations are timid, say in places such as Cincinnati? Should we be discussing viral marketing? If you’re an advertiser or an agency, it’s a scary proposition.

The list of epic fails is, itself, epic. Harken back to Aqua Teen Hunger Force and the Boston bomb scare it incited, or to the singer Ashanti’s viral “death threat” campaign, Chevy Tahoe or Virgin’s B3ta competition.

At the Creative Department, we’ve always been big champions of non-traditional marketing. If you’ve worked with us, you know that. (If you haven’t, then why haven’t you?) But when the “V” word pops up, we take pause. With a client who empowers us to go for the Big Idea, we will find it and execute it. We will place it in channels we agree are most conducive to engaging the desired audience. And we’ll make it so people will like it.

The risk with viral is trying to second guess what odd twist, stupid human trick or irreverent content will hook into the zeitgeist of the moment and fill email inboxes around the world.

Absolutely talk about it with your agency or your client, but it’s probably best to do so with great care, the way you’d talk with someone about whether or not to release nerve gas. The risks are big. The payoff can be big. But the client-agency relationship has to be right. We would want it to be one of supreme trust with minutely managed expectations for the project and more positive vibes than Pollyanna on nitrous oxide.

To viral or not to viral, that is still the question. And will be. We haven’t satisfactorily answered it for ourselves, but we have come to identify certain realities. The client has to be ambitious. The agency has to be deeply resourceful. And both must be realistic and share a huge amount of trust to even broach the discussion.

Even with those ideal conditions, our suggestion is to be smart, not risky. As avenues in social media open and new technologies in traditional media augment the advertiser’s toolbox, the ability to stop talking at the audience and start talking with them opens exciting opportunities.

Make communications that engage the audience and serve your strategy, and happiness will be yours, Grasshopper.

So, viral schmiral. To paraphrase one insightful Web denizen, agencies and clients cannot presume to determine what is viral content. Only the people can do that.

Our friends over at Aardvark sent us some exciting news late last week. Their research paper,“Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine” (originally published back in October 2009) was selected to be presented at WWW 2010. This happens to be the same venue that Google presented their research paper, “Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine” 12 years ago.

If you haven’t checked out Aardvark, you should. Our agency is a big fan of the work they are doing with social search. For more information see this TechCrunch overview.

Several years ago a group of friends and I started tailgating for UC Football games. As the Cincinnati Football program has grown overtime, so has our tailgate. Two years ago we purchased “The Ultimate Tailgate Trailer” by pooling together funds that investment then grew to a blog, BearcatTailgater.com. There is something very unique about our tailgate, everything is provided and all we ask is for a donation. These donations go to cover maintenance costs along with donations to several charities in our community.

When we first started tailgating we had roughly 10-20 people showing up, we knew we needed more people to not only get fans excited but to do more good in our community. Using social tools has allowed our initial group to leverage our vast social and professional circles to draw attendance each week. Each week (and year round) we blog, tweet and have an active facebook presence.

A lot of people say using social tools (media) is FREE and it certainly doesn’t cost you license fees, etc but it does take a lot of hard work to write content and keep everything current. Luckily our initial group of investors have several tech savy individuals and collectively we make all this work while still being able to focus on our real jobs (this is a hobby, not a job).

What started out as 10 guys getting together each week, has turned into crowds of 250+, sponsors such as Hudy Delight and Dean’s Dairy Dip. We even had a visit from Bush’s Baked Bean’s Tailgate Tour for homecoming. All of this has led to earned media from the Cincinnati Enquirer, 700WLW, 1530 HOMER, ESPN, ESPNU and many local TV news outlets. Not to mention that we were selected as “Tailgater of the Year” by Tailgater Monthly Magazine.

This proves that if you are passionate about something (in this case football and doing good) and some time to write about what you are doing, turning any brand social as unlimited possibilities!

Recently BMW has been running a promotional campaign to encourage users of BMW Financial to log into their account, pay their bill online and sign-up for auto-pay. This campaign is actually pretty interesting, seeing as owners get credit for using certain features of their online account for the past several months. As the customer continues to complete different activities, they are included in contests for prizes and unique experiences related to golf.

I love to golf and I use BMW’s online services all the time so it is nice to see that I could actually win for doing what I do each and every month.

The issue with this execution is the account log in page takeover. While takeovers are usually pretty interesting, this one is flat out annoying. Not only has it been in place for several months, it prevents you from actually logging in to your account. It takes you to a landing page that makes you then link back to the real log-in screen.

Why slow down access to the user’s online account when you are trying to encourage usage?

Screen shot of take over:

Screen shot of same page without takeover:

Realtime social web engagement analytics number cruncher, PostRank, has just announced their Top Blogs of 2009, and the Creative Department’s Squeak of the Week was awarded Top Blog in the Advertising, Branding, and Marketing categories. We’re #2 in the Web Design category behind Smashing Magazine.

The awards are based on audience engagement, and PostRank notes that off-site engagement (readers tweeting your posts, post links on Facebook, etc) now accounts for over 80% of all audience engagement. Squeak of the Week was also recognized for Most Engagement (overall highest engagement), Most Influential (overall highest average engagement), and Biggest Mover & Shaker (highest increase in engagement) in each of the above categories.

Much thanks to PostRank for the recognition and to all of our writers for their hard work.