Enpiem Internet Marketing Blog

April fools from Enpiem Internet Marketing!

One of the most popular requests to the Internet marketer is for a ‘viral’ marketing campaign, a campaign that spreads like wildfire throughout the Internet gaining massive momentum and a vast upturn in traffic or sales without the associated acquisition cost. In addition to their request popularity, they are probably the most misunderstood activity and probably the hardest to develop successfully. There are many excellent campaign examples and we’ll look at a few, but these have been well planned, well resourced (funded) and well executed and crafted to a product that lends itself to this type of activity.

So how do you plan a viral marketing campaign? There are a number of factors to take into consideration. Providing something for nothing is a great place to start, this was how Hotmail became so popular, it was a free resource that recruited additional users through in-email promotion, free software or tools are also popular. Playing on user behaviours is another great factor to consider. For example, many successful virals have made the transmitting individual of the viral tool appear ‘cool’ and ‘benevolent’ be this through pass on a special offer, a free resource or something personalised and funny. People like to be popular so play to these desires with your viral campaign. Borrowing from medical terminology, a virus only spreads when it is easy to transmit to others. The same is true of digital viral campaigns, email is an obvious and free way that the message can be passed on – so keep the transmission process fluid and easy to replicate.

Another important factor in planning your campaign is to remember not to get destroyed by your own success! Again, taking a medical analogy, if your virus consumes the host then it will cause the host to die, if the viral campaign requires users to visit your website to do something and traffic exceeds your bandwidth allowance then the site will go offline and your virus will die – ensure your campaign either has scalability built in or doesn’t rely on limited resources to provide it. With an email based viral campaign you are encouraging your recipients to use their own email accounts and addresses to spread the word, rather than paying for these emails to go through your network using your bandwidth. With video viral campaigns Youtube is an excellent way of tapping into others infrastructure for streaming content without the need for the users bandwidth or the need for attachments.

Famous Examples

Viral marketing campaigns come in a wide variety of delivery formats. Some are interactive and others are just images or videos to watch. Here are a number of very popular viral campaigns that we have been the recipient of over the past few years, many are still available online:

1. Do the test - a clever video viral for Transport for London that gets across the message about how easily it is to miss something (in the case of this campaign’s message cyclists) whilst using a humorous method of explaining a very serious point.
2. Quicksilver – Dynamite surfing – a supposed hit-and-run viral video where a surfer paddles out into a river whilst somebody throws dynamite into the river and the surfer rides the wave generated by the underwater explosion. This was completely staged but went massively viral, supposedly attracting over 10 million page views in the first few months
3. Threshers 40% Off Voucher – made popular when it was publicised that this was an accidental publication of an offer supposed to be for a limited number of people but thanks to email, social networks and blogs it was passed widely around and attracted a massive up-turn in sales
4. Subservient Chicken (Burger King) – a campaign that started in 2004 and is still available online at www. subservientchicken.com. It is supposed to have generated over 46-million page views during the first few weeks alone. This campaign is interactive and involved the user.
5. M&M Candy Lab - some time ago we reviewed the Cadbury’s M&M brand viral marketing campaign and it still ranks amongst our list of favourites. Sadly it isn’t available any longer, but you can read our blog entry about the mechanism used

Whilst these examples embody the best practice of viral marketing campaigns and the excellent execution of the concept, it is easy for a campaign to either fail to become ’viral’ or worse…backfire on the brand. Sony ran a campaign that used false blogs and supposed user-feedback to promote their PSP product, but this backfired when it was found to be a staged campaign, you can read the article on the Guardian newspaper’s website - here

Enpiem Internet Marketing provide strategic Internet marketing consultancy for b2b and b2c organisations and tailored marketing solutions, including viral marketing project management. Contact us to see how we can help your business succeed online.

The key to your success is planning. All effective campaigns start with a well thought out plan, as this picture we found shows…

It is unclear as to which formal planning methodology Godzilla used. Enpiem Internet marketing on the other hand use the SOSTAC framework to create bespoke campaigns for our clients. SOSTAC is an acronym for the component elements of the framework - Situation Analysis, Objectives, Strategy, Tactics, Actions and Control.

Enpiem Internet Marketing provide strategic Internet marketing campaign planning and campaign management. Contact us to find out how we can help you get the most of your website and business online.

We saw this on the Viralbank website – an HTML tattoo!

Have a very Happy Christmas and a peaceful new year from Enpiem Internet Marketing.

Yesterday we received an email from a friend telling us they had sent us a ‘candy lab creation’ with a short personal message and a ‘click here to view’ link. Clicking on the link brought up a scientist’s lab with two M&M characters standing each side of a giant M&M. One character told his colleague to ‘play the message’ where upon a photo of Nick’s face appeared on the giant M&M and proceeded to lip-sync to the song ‘I want candy’ (a track originally recorded in 1965 by the ‘Strangeloves’). The eyes of the photograph blinked and moved and the mouth opened and sang in what was a hilarious couple of minutes of embarrassment for Nick!

This turns out to be an excellent viral online marketing campaign from M&Ms to support their microsite http://www.mymms.com/ a site for consumers to personalise M&M sweets with names, messages and photographs. The viral campaign is a clever way informing consumers of their new production capability to print faces on the surface of an M&M. We were hooked and had to send out a couple to friends of ours and hence passed on the viral infection – the hallmark of a good viral marketing campaign. The process of uploading a photo is well organised with clear non-technical instructions. You can crop and zoom the photo to best capture the face and that’s all there is to it. In addition to a choice of two song clips you can also create custom messages that are spoken by the photo character.

From there it’s a simple matter of completing the details of you name and email and the recipients name and email with an optional personal message and that’s it. You can also copy HTML code and embed your singing face on a web page.

The viral was developed for M&Ms by the agency IMC2 interactive using Oddcast’s PhotoFace technology and is a great example of doing a viral right. Highly interactive and personal (like the Mini Cooper ‘ave a word’ campaign) that puts across a product offering in a highly entertaining way that leaves you reaching for your digital photo album and email address book. Well done M&Ms!

To get your friends, family and colleagues singing along – visit http://www.thecandylab.com/