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Viral Marketing: 6 Point Plan
UK-Netmarketing Weekly Round-up - June 29, 2001

The whys and wherefores of viral marketing, still a hot topic of discussion of uk-netmarketing discussion. What are the golden rules? Ray Taylor shared and embellished some points he picked up on a recent e-marketing course, "Mostly what I hear about viral marketing is complete tosh, from complete toshers (UKNM members excepted of course) but the following was proposed at a recent course on essential e-marketing and for which I extend my gratitude to the trainer Mark Littlewood. Apologies to him if any of the following misrepresents his views, and I have taken the liberty of adding my own point number 7.

Six point plan for viral marketing

Make it scaleable, from small to large
Use existing 'viral' networks (e.g. web, email, phone)
Exploit common motivation and behaviours (for which I read lowest common denominator)
Must have a valuable give-away
Transfer must be effortless (e.g. hit 'Forward' button)
Take advantage of others' resources
And I would add the following:
Must be original and unique(ish) Anyone want to venture any others?" He signed off with a particularly relevant email sig, "Go viral! sneeze on someone today!"

John Braithwaite replied, "I guess I'd add:

Jim Sterne added another point, "10. Add the investment to your budget figures but do not add the return on that investment to your sales forecasts."

Dave Smith speculated on how the media might want to use these criteria, "I'd add 'must be accessible to the target audience', both in choice of technology and file size. Maybe you should forward these to some of our industry magazines Ray, because some clearly haven't got a clue. If I had a pound for every time I read about campaigns that are 'viral' where they quite clearly aren't, I'd be in profit by quarter 4 along with everyone else."

Leigh Blue Caldwell looked at what motivates user's to make a campaign 'viral', "The 'virus' must take into account the psychology of two things to be successful, just like a real virus: its effectiveness within the host and its effectiveness at spreading. I say 'psychology' because the real host of a viral marketing message is a recipient's mind, with some participation from the computer.

Effectiveness within the host is: what do people do to use or benefit from the item? What is their motivation to open the attachment, or visit the URL, or run the VBScript which will infect their PC? It might be that the give-away is actually valuable, or there might be another compelling reason to respond to the call to action. It could be that the link will relieve boredom (time of day may be important)... As always, it's hard for a directly commercial offering to achieve this. But it can be done - bmwfilms seems to be a good example of a highly commercial message combined with a powerful consumer benefit.

Effectiveness at reproduction is partly influenced by item 5, effort. It's also influenced by what people will gain from passing it on. I'd imagine one of the key [motivations] is 'what will the recipient think of me for sending this on?' If the answer is 'they'll think I've fallen for another Internet hoax/commercial trick' then that may be a disincentive to pass it on. If the answer is 'they'll think I've found a cool thing for them to look at and they'll get some entertainment out of it' that is an incentive. If it's 'they'll think I'm politically astute/charitable/clever/ humorous' that's even better."

One of the difficulties with a viral campaign is often measuring its success, as Sally Krumholz pointed out, "...the other issue is trackability. Some email systems are configured to handle this. But some of the solutions cannot handle this feature. I'd love it if i could import my contacts into these 'refer a friend' feature & save myself having to type it out. I'm sure I've forwarded stuff before & the marketer has no idea where it was sourced from."

John Braithwaite emailed, "In fact, I would go so far as to say that offering a valuable give-away is 'cheating'... as anyone can get traffic through doing this. The really effective viral campaigns are the ones that aren't 'expensive', 'costly' and are of low value - but have high interest and response. The second difficulty is sustaining this kind of work."

From this discussion it looks like viral marketers need to take good stock of what will motivate users to make their campaigns 'go viral' rather than a clever mechanic or technology. Is the hype justified? Well, if it can be harnessed the results can be fantastic, but like a real-world virus, don't forget that once it's in the wild, managing it can be a real headache.

Web Analytics

ROI. Return on investment. Justifying the budget. 18 months ago, these phrases were given lip service. Now, it feels like business as usual, spend money...then make a business case for it. With this in mind, analysing your website to make sure it's performing to its potential is certainly high on the agenda. Max Blumberg asked, "Does anyone know of any sites/situations where web-analytics has proved helpful?"

Alex Chudnovsky responded, "I find web analytics cost and time effective which in combination provides unparalleled value. By value I mean real money -- sales, and err, profits. ...One example would take into account only one or two indicators (the ones that you prefer, something many marketing people love to do) out of many. The other would be relying on things risks of which you do not fully understand. I can go on for the whole day.

You just have to be careful and know what you doing, constantly evaluate your progress and keep your mind open about many things. Just like in any job, right? Bottom line: You should employ the right people ;)"

Ian Thomas outlined how useful his clients were finding analytics, "The experience of talking to our customers indicates that they tend to be looking at analytics for one of the following reasons:

They're under pressure to justify continued/existing investment in on-line activities
They want to improve the monetisation of the site (i.e. sell more stuff by being better)
They want to understand their users better, but don't want to spend truckloads on an expensive CRM tool
They want to be able to measure the effectiveness of on-line marketing (either to justify spending money on it, or to justify charging money for it)

It may just be our particular customer base, but we haven't spoken to anyone who sees analytics as simply a 'nice to have' - perhaps because our software is a little too expensive to buy as a fashion accessory. In fact, many of the people we speak to are looking to move on from "simple" analytics to more complex, involved stuff, driven by one of the needs above. But you might get a different story from the likes of WebTrends or Hitbox, who have lower-end tools."

Max Blumberg replied, "You email highlights an interesting point: are analytics a leading or lagging indicator? For example, let's say that

our accountants tell us that our web site ROI is an unacceptable 4% (hey at least it's one of the positive ones!), and that
e-metrics tell us that, in a certain section of us site, our yield, RFM and focus are less than optimal, but that cost/conversion and stickiness/slipperiness are acceptable.

I wonder whether this is sufficient information to know what changes to make? The data seems to suggest that yield, RFM and focus MAY be the reasons for our low ROI but how does one translate this into actionable web site changes? Do we need to make the changes and then see whether ROI improves; if it doesn't, then make more changes (based on more analytics) until we do see an improvement? This would suggest that metrics are a lagging indicator.

However if we could find metrics that could tell us exactly what changes we should make to e.g. paths, layout, design etc, then would we have a leading indicator on how hands? Perhaps we don't yet have the metrics to allow such precision? Already I hear designers saying 'Ah, but it will never be that precise; the metrics can only tell you where the problem lies, but they you'll need people with our experience to act on these analytics to change the site in such a way that it leads to an increased ROI'.

Ian Tester summed up, "On a very basic level, it's crucial to have an accurate view on basic traffic stats, purely for bandwidth / capacity planning. If you're selling ads, some sort of view on the ad impressions can also be pretty useful, as it determines inventory size.

Then we start getting into the more complex stuff - path analysis is gong to inform design and content strategy, retention is going to inform marketing. Referrer information is going to tell you where your traffic is coming from and whether that content deal you did with big bad publisher is sending any traffic your way at all, and whether that three grand you paid to the bloke for search engine optimisation actually did work. And this is just the basic stuff off your webserver logs.

Then you get into the really clever stuff - decent registration procedures, CRM, clickstream can deliver you the most amazing insights into your target audience. Link it all up to some well thought out personalisation, and you're swinging. However, the problem's in the delivery. Most people can't even get their page impressions right, so progress from there is patchy at the very best.

As Alex says, it's all about getting the right people to set it up, measuring the right things (and this will never be the same for any 2 businesses), and drawing the right conclusions. But as Jim points out, bad delivery can often do more harm than good, and can often send people in completely the wrong direction as they draw inappropriate conclusions from dodgy data. And then there's the invoice for the huge chunky CRM software and the consultants to pay. Web Analytics is very very hard to do (and usually pretty expensive too)."

LINKS OF NOTE:
A quick round up of interesting, funny, useful and other links gleaned from the uk-netmarketing list, office gossip and other nefarious sources...we take no responsibility should you chose to click...basically, it's not our fault. Enjoy:

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