Human Nature and Why Free Covid Tests Went Viral

This week the US government launched the website to order free at-home COVID tests, and it was basically impossible to not hear about it. Someone shared it on the EMBA WhatsApp class of 2022 chat and immediately many students chimed in with a note of thanks. After placing my own order, in under a minute, I quickly passed it onto my husband, to tell him to share it with his uncle. He had just complained he was having trouble finding tests after an exposure. It’s easy to see why and how so many folks wanted to share this link with friends and family. In a time when there isn’t a lot we can do to support one another on the logistics of the pandemic, this feels like an easy win. NYTimes journalist Shira Ovide shares that human behaviorists believe “the test kit website may have gone viral for some of the same reasons that a Black Friday sale can spread quickly: It makes us feel good to tell others something that may be helpful — especially if the information feels like secret knowledge — and we tend to trust people we know more than experts.” The virality of help is addicting – it feels good to share good or helpful news, especially with those of whom we care most deeply. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/20/technology/free-covid-tests.html?searchResultPosition=1

How a simple tweet went viral, copyright protection and other things...

It’s a marketer’s dream to go viral, that too for free, however when I recently tweeted about my sister taking a selfie with one of Bollywood’s biggest superstars and globally recognized actress, Aishwarya Rai Bachan - it became front page news!

Within minutes the tweet had been retweeted multiple times and and favourited by many more. Fan clubs took the photo and tweeted it using their own handle. This led to gossip websites blantantly stealing the photo and uploading it onto their pages replete with articles about how Aishwarya was the new “selfie” queen and how she’d been bitten by the “selfie bug.” These were compeletely fabricated stories just to add grab more attention and eyeballs. I was absolutely taken aback by how viral the tweet had become. Had I known this easlier I would have done a couple of things.

1) If you take a photo with a celebrity or feel it has potential to go viral - make sure you put your copyright on it. Copyright rules state that the owners of the photograph can bring down a photo if not duly credited. Still, it will be difficult for you to get your photo off different websites and they will be willing to take it down if you simply have your copyright sign on it.
2) Copyright signs can be put free of charge using online software Ofcourse if anyone finds a app that does it for the phone even better.

Viral Marketing, the new marketing

Viral Marketing is used by companies to spread through the internet information or commercials about their products or services. Viral Marketing can be delivered through many channels: text message, e-books, blogs twitter, web pages  and video clips. This type of strategy is aimed to individuals with high social networking potential. This helps to spread the mouth very quickly with a minimum cost.

Additionally, people pay more attention and rely more in the opinion of their friends, so viral marketing has a greater impact in the behavior of people.

The increase of social networks these last years has led marketers to adopt viral marketing in each campaign.

But what do you need to be successful in this new marketing?

First, we need a creative campaign, a good story. This will allow marketers to catch the attention of the people and increase the popularity through the recommendation of friends. Viral Marketing generally takes advantage of common behaviors and motivations, to encourage others to share their commercials.

Second, it must to be easy to transfer this information to other people. Fortunately, the development of social network has been crucial to allow Companies to use Viral Marketing.

Finally, we should avoid misinterpretations in the messages.  This can ruin the reputation of a company in a few days, as it is impossible to control the information available in the internet.

Marketers always have to pay attention at the reaction of the public at the beginning of a marketing campaign in order to react as quickly as possible and avoid bad comments to spread in the web.

Lourdes Peirano

The Two Types of Viralities

When hears about content going "viral" this actually could mean two different things. The true type of virality, when people perpetuate a meme without any kind of reward, is known as "evangelism". The second type of virality, when people perpetuate a meme for some sort of reward, is known as "obligation". For example a obligation model for a gaming site may tie ability to play the game in exchange for placing an add in the players social feed. From a business perspective both types of virality are valid models, but typically the "evangelism" model is the most effective and successful. The problem is that with evagelism, you actually need to have a remarkable meme. Obligation viral models can work when others are not used to seeing the type of message you are sharing. But obligation virality doesn't create the same type of respect and perpetuating power as evangelism virality.

http://whatgamesare.com/2011/11/the-two-viralities-marketing.html

Facebook Stalking Goes Viral

Halloween is over, but Facebook privacy scares will go on. Director Jason Zada created eerie viral buzz this year with his "Take This Lollipop" video project (TakeThisLollipop.com) which puts Facebook privacy issues front and center.

The web page is very simple: a blue lollipop (a non-coincidentally Facebook blue) with a Facebook Connect button. Once you log in and give it permission to access your profile information, the ride begins. I don't want to be a spoiler, but suffice it to say that the video incorporates your photos and location information to take stalking to a new extreme.

The site was featured on The New York Times and Forbes.com. So far, over 8.5 million people have liked the page. Personally, I had fun recruiting friends for the experience and seeing their reactions. Ad Age reported that the piece was polarizing inside of the Facebook team, which is understandable. While it's extreme in its depiction of the dangers of Facebooking, the viral nature of the video is some indication that at it resonates with people at some level.

http://adage.com/article/digital/reach-beats-frequency-facebook-s-layout/230718/

How to Create a Viral Launch Page

I am currently working on a web start up that I hope to launch in the next 6 months. We are doing extensive market research and starting to grapple with the biggest question that it seems almost every web start up faces: now that we feel we've identified a service that people will actually (hopefully) want to use, how do we reach users and build a community? And then once we've actually gotten a sizable user database, say, 100,000 users or whatever metric is appropriate to your particular service/product, how do you get that to grow to 1 million users? The digital marketing landscape is an intimidating and potentially expensive and problem-fraught area for new websites to tackle. Do you pay for Google Adwords? Too expensive or not appropriate in the early stages of a new site?

And then you read about the sites that have gone from 0 to 10,000 users within their first week of launching. One of the ways these sites have built an initial frenzy of excitement, collected email addresses, gained PR, and built a "brand" even before activation of their sites has been through viral launch or landing pages. A launch or landing page for a start up typically includes anywhere from a name, email address box, and perhaps a photo, all the day up to a product description, signup forms, social media links, and more. Some are mysterious and exclusive, others informative. Ultimately, however, they allow a new site to start marketing to customers and building a user database before even having something to offer them. If the launch page is done properly and gets the right attention and PR, its like running a race by getting a couple laps ahead of your competition before the start gun goes off.

There is an absolutely phenomenal post on viral launch pages for those of you who are currently working on or planning to work on your own website or just curious, courtesy of Smashing Magazine:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/09/01/elements-of-a-viral-launch-page/.

Old Spice Guy vs. Fabio = Big Ad Win

In another sign of the impending apocalypse, Mashable reports that the latest incarnation of Old Spice Guy drew 22 million views on YouTube.

Online Social Gaming - The Real Opportunity

Doing my weekly browsing of digital marketing news I came across a blog entry by Steve Olenski called “The Big Opportunity Marketers Are Missing Right Now”

http://www.stargroup1.com/blog/big-opportunity-marketers-are-missing-right-now

Olenski argues that on-line social gaming is a huge opportunity for marketers given its size (around 250 million users a month of which 59% of the adult category are women). In his view companies undervalue this medium to advertise to their customers, only 16% of the companies surveyed by Forrester have plans to use social games in their U.S. marketing strategies in the next year. Additionally, only 19% believe on-line social gaming will become a more effective marketing vehicle in the next three years.

Although I think Olenski is right, i.e. companies should definitely be advertising in online social gaming, I believe he misses to touch on the real potential of social games. Marketers should start thinking of how to use on-line social games around their brands to engage current and potential customers around something that is entertaining for them. Companies could build simple games that can potentially go viral and gather a lot of data from their customers. People are playing an entertaining on-line game while the company is gathering information about the customers’ interactions with the products. The benefit is three-fold, first it is a vehicle for brand building, second it is an opportunity to introduce product features and benefits to clients, and third marketers can disguise conjoint analyses studies in games.

The Old Spice guy comes to mind. After the success of the TV ad P&G spent a significant amount of money to shoot more than a hundred responses to influencers (celebrities, bloggers, etc.). Although a very smart move to extract more mileage from the ad idea, P&G could have gone even further and built a simple on-line game (e.g. the guy responding with predefined lines to questions posed by the users, similar to the idea behind Burger King’s subservient chicken)

In conclusion, marketers can use on-line social gaming to let their creativity lose and build viral games that allow them to pursue several marketing objectives at the same time.

Creating a "Viral" Marketing Campaign

I started this post as a comment to my classmate's post on how well adults recognize marketing, but decided that based on the different specific focus, this deserved to be its own blog post. The other blog post made the point that many people fail to realize that videos are part of a marketing campaign, particularly when these videos are funny in their own right. I not only agree with this point, but take it further by suggesting that the key to a marketing campaign's success is the ability to get consumers to enjoy playing and distributing the company's advertisements because the consumer wants to for his own reasons (i.e. it's funny or useful or interesting enough to watch and pass on to friends).

This raises an interesting question: can a company "create" a viral marketing campaign, and if so, how does one go about this? While I'm sure Professor Kagan is full of thoughts on this, I wanted to open it up to the class for comments.

My own view is that even though one can create a viral marketing campaign, this needs to be done in ways that dramatically diverge from traditional marketing techniques. For example, in the case of funny viral videos, it may make more sense to hire comedic film producers (like the guys from College Humor) to run a funny campaign with or based on your company's product, rather than to rely on people within your company to suddenly "become funny." Similarly, for viral videos based on usefulness, it probably makes sense for a company (especially a startup on a smaller budget) to scour YouTube for relevant experts in the field, and contract with these people directly to promote your product in the same kinds of videos they have produced with millions of hits.

The Internet and sites like YouTube have allowed anybody to become a film-maker on a very small budget, which allows all companies (big and small) to experiment cheaply in trying to create the kind of "viral" campaign that will stick. If even one of these videos actually does "go viral" and become the kind of advertisement that nobody even thinks of as an advertisement you have succeeded. The question is how to make this happen in the first place.

The Real Story Behind Bros Icing Bros

By Karl Moats

Ladies, I apologize in advance.

Hopefully you laughed a little during the bomb also known as "Sex & The City 2". Because with the July arrival of the LeBron Sweepstakes, the World Cup, and the return of "Jersey Shore" (in Miami this time), the Summer of 2010 is poised to become the Summer of Bro-dom. And the official drink of the Summer of Bro-Dom is (unfortunately) Smirnoff Ice.

***
There are certain Internet fads you wish you could fast-forward life until they are over. RickRolling was especially painful. The “Hitler Hates The Jonas Brothers/The Minnesota Vikings etc. memes, while hilarious, are thankfully on their last legs.

The latest, and by far, the vilest of the Internet memes is Bros Icing Bros. The game is simple. If a friend surprises you with a Smirnoff Ice, you “got iced.” By rule, you must get down on one knee and chug it. To be clear, there are no winners here. You simply have to drink more Smirnoff Ices you never wanted to drink in the first place. Trust me, no bro is happier after a Smirnoff Ice than he was before it. Yet by a quirk of fate, Smirnoff is rewarded for making such a dreadful libation. You could always quit playing, but that’s the move of a Faux-Bro (See also: Rodriguez, Alex).

From those twin pillars of Bro-dom justice, the rules diverge based on apartment and cruelty of roommates. At the Rivergate apartment on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the game has unfortunately taken on more of a guerilla war tone. The fridge is the only Holy Land. Beyond that, all’s fair in love and icing. Smirnoff Ices are hidden, not just presented. Any pile of laundry or especially chubby cat could be “landmined” with a lurking Smirnoff Ice. You can be iced at any time. No time, too early (see: 7:13 AM last Monday). No event (final exam, wedding, investor meeting), too important.

My roommate, let’s call him Uncle Benny, works in Private Equity. I am in school. It’s a veritable New York Yankees vs. Kansas City Royals matchup, and Uncle Benny has a George Steinbrennerian desire to win no matter the price. When I got back from a long day of classes Tuesday, I checked the deli downstairs and saw all the six-packs of Smirnoff Ice were sold out. I could only sigh. Uncle Benny had been shopping, again.

I live in fear. The left pocket of my favorite pair of jeans is now forever molded to the shape of a Smirnoff bottle. Security often stops me while leaving Duane Reade or Chipotle until they see the suspicious bulge is a lukewarm bottle of malt-liquor and realize not even shop-lifters would stoop so low. I carry a Smirnoff Ice on me at all times. Even when I go run. Make that, especially when I go run.

It gets worse. As New Yorkers can attest, the past two weeks have been excruciatingly hot. Keep in mind these “Ices” typically sit around in boiling Manhattan apartments for days on end. So what’s it like to drink a four day old, warm Smirnoff Ice? It’s perhaps most aptly described by the following clip from “Anchorman”:



***
Bros Icing Bros is not a campaign by Smirnoff Ice. Smirnoff’s marketing team only wishes it could be so clever. Instead, Bros Icing Bros was the brainchild of a couple meatheads at the fratiest of all Southern colleges: The College of Charleston (Think: walking, talking J-Crew magazine with a Southern accent).

The frat boys set up a website BrosIcingBros.com, where users can upload pictures of the more spectacular ices. They posted a couple icing videos on Youtube and Facebook. From there, Bros Icing Bros spilled up the East Coast before hitting the New York City epicenter. Investment bankers especially got a kick out of it. An icing was recently reported at Goldman Sachs.

Typically Internet memes fizzle out within weeks. What’s worrisome is Bros Icing Bros is only escalating. Social media expert Sandy Smallens believes, “We're gonna see more of this. Now that everything can be delivered through digital media, what's the last authentic thing? Spontaneous experience.”

The frat boys, Smallens said, are at the vanguard of the next phase in social media: real life. Smallens believes memes such as Icing Bros will become more potent in the future because they build a feedback loop between Internet you and real world you.

In translation, it took a while but frat boys finally figured out the social media game. Meatheads could always ruin your day off-line, now they can do it online as well. Smallens believes corporations will now follow suit.

In translation, don’t forget you ice block, bro!

Oscar Mayer wants to give your dad $5,000….and then send him to an early grave

Last week, Oscar Mayer announced an online Father’s Day contest to find the “Oscar Mayer Bacon Sizzling Dad.” One lucky dad will receive a year’s supply of bacon, $5,000 cash, and presumably put himself on the fast track to a triple bypass.

http://www.facebook.com/OscarMayer

What I found interesting about this particular giveaway was that it represents a great example of a corporation capitalizing on an internet meme. For those of you that are unfamiliar with the term, a meme can be any offbeat idea that propagates quickly through email, youtube, or social network. You might already be familiar with the most popular internet memes such as Lolcats or the unstoppable RickRoll.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_internet_memes

Over the past two years, a new internet meme has formed around bacon. Yes, that’s right, bacon. Countless blogs and message boards have taken our favorite breakfast food and humorously theorized its use for such items as the bacon briefcase (shown) or iPhone carrying case. Black Rock Spirits has even taken two of my favorite consumables, bacon and booze, and combined them to form Bacon Flavored Vodka as an actual product.

http://bakonvodka.com/

Even though Oscar Mayer has not directly referenced the internet bacon craze of recent years, they are undoubtedly aware of how popular it has become within certain internet subcultures. Not surprisingly, the same internet mediums responsible for promoting the bacon meme have also given a huge publicity boost to Oscar Mayer’s latest viral marketing effort. So for the small price of $5,000, the Company has turned an existing internet phenomenon into its own marketing tool and generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in free advertising.

Porn and advertising....a winning partnership?

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"Branded" E-Cards

There was an interesting write-up on Tech Crunch the other day about the Online Greeting Card Company Someecards use of “branded cards” to generate additional advertising revenue. For those of you unfamiliar with either the company or its “branded cards”, here is an example of a "branded card" (on the left) and a regular card (on the right): 

As you can see from these images these “branded cards” look almost identical to the regular cards that the company stocks, but feature a small logo from the paid sponsor near the bottom of the page. Generally, the sponsor is in someway tied to the greeting on the card. For example, a recent "branded card" had the greeting “ I hope a sexy, exotic woman we smuggle across the Mexican border never gets in the way of our friendship” and was sponsored by the hit series about urban drug dealers, Weeds. Another for Daily Candy had the following greeting: “May you never let the crumbling economy get the way of fulfilling my Christmas list (see below for a snapshot of both of these aforementioned cards).

(Images taken from httphttp://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/11/someecards-have-ads-i-actually-pay-attention-to-and-theyre-about-to-do-video/://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/11/someecards-have-ads-i-actually-pay-attention-to-and-theyre-about-to-do-video/)

In my opinion, selling “branded “ cards is an excellent business move on the part of the company. Not only is Someecards able to substantially increase sales through these new “branded ad” (these new ads are sold at a premium, and in addition to regular banner/wrap ads that are still featured alongside the cards), but these ads have the real potential of going viral because they can be easily shared through social media sites. Moreover, by tying the content to the advertiser's brand and vice versa Somecards is ensuring greater brand synergy/ logic/ fluidity to the cards, while at the same time not compromising or cheapening its content.

In the future, I think this technique could be used by other E-Card/ greeting services such as BlueMountain or Hallmark. I also think that this technique could have possible extensions with free Facebook applications.  Moreover, in the long-term I think these integrated forms of online advertising will start to pose a real threat to the banner ad approach to the online marketing.

Lost Ad Revenue

I kept CNN playing in the background while I was working on class project today. As I listened intermittently, I heard the segment about Susan Boyle’s defeat yesterday on the British television show, "Britain's Got Talent".  Her fans seemed to be disappointed, but others should be for a different reason.

Several weeks ago, the American media hype about the unlikely contestant’s performance on the show generated over 20 million views online. The video clips of Susan Boyle’s performance has made her a worldwide internet sensation. Her performance on  "Britain's Got Talent" was one of the most viewed videos on You Tube ever, but the producers of the show have not been able to capitalize on the success of the of the internet viewership worldwide. The primary reason is the producers of the show did not roll out online video strategy and the second reason is the video uploads to You Tube were done illegally, so no advertising revenue streams were generated. The video host as well as the content provider missed out on a significant advertising revenue stream. 

So why do many  video content providers  fail to execute on a strategy to generate online revenue streams as video advertising has become one of the fastest growing advertising mediums? One reason may be the producers are concerned with the cannibalization of TV advertizing dollars as more TV viewer convert to online viewers. One solution could be to broadcast original programming on TV and in syndication upload online. Another approach may be to upload original programming online to target a secondary geographic market.  Moreover, established content producers view online broadcasting as  experimental and do not quite understand what works effectively. Besides, one could argue that there are no established revenue models for online video.

As for Susan she still has a chance capitalize on this phenomenon and perhaps land projects such as a book deal, recording contract or a movie about her life.

Heineken Viral Video

A little example of viral video from my client Heineken - check it out!

Heineken Draught Keg URL: http://heinekendraughtkeg.com/embed/?justwatch=true