Six Keys to Going Viral

You can't plan a campaign today without dreaming that it will go viral like the Old Spice Guy or Diet Coke + Mentos videos. So how do you increase your campaign's chances of taking off?

Tod Maffin, COO and Senior Strategist of tMedia Strategies Inc., took fifty viral sensations and broke them down, teasing out the keys to their success. The result is Deconstructing Viral: How to Build a Killer Marketing Campaign, in which Maffin details six steps required for launching a viral campaign.

The first step involves audience, content, and call to action matching (ACC matching). You have a brand audience, which consists of your customers and potential customers. Your campaign has a creative target, the people most likely to view and enjoy the campaign. And your campaign has a call to action, with an audience most likely to answer that call to action. Your job as a marketer is to make all three of those audiences match.

Two contrasting examples are Häagen-Dazs's Honeybees campaign and Nike's Ronaldinho Touch of Gold campaign. Honeybees failed. Why? For one, the creative targets don't match the brand audience or call to action targets. On the other hand, Nike's Ronaldinho campaign went viral because it achieves an ACC match.

The second step is to stick with a single, simple concept. The Nike video starts with Ronaldinho putting on shoes, then kicking a soccer ball into the goal posts four times (Nike eventually confessed that the video was digitally altered). The honeybee video, on the other hand, is too complex. It focuses on rapping, dancing bees, and its message appears only at the very end, with no brand identification.

Achieving the right campaign attitude is the third step. Many people think the key to going viral is to be funny, even stupidly so, but Maffin says it's more complicated than that. He believes that viral marketing boils down to one of three approaches: silly, serious, or stunning. The Nike video qualifies as stunning (digital manipulation notwithstanding).

The fourth step involves sharing. The key is not just to encourage sharing but to reward it. Take the Doritos Unidentified Flavor campaign, where people purchased bags of mystery flavor chips, submitted a name and a thirty-second commercial, and waited for votes to determine the finalists. Unfortunately, Doritos relied on people promoting their own videos, so the campaign never achieved viral traction. After that, Doritos changed from votes to a sophisticated point system based on how and where the videos were shared. There were large bonuses for weekly performance, exotic referring countries, and ranking among the top 5 in Google searches for contest keywords.

The fifth step is to embrace "the unofficials." It's not just ad campaigns that go viral. When Steve Spangler created geysers on TV by dropping Mentos into Diet Coke, he created a phenomenon. The two companies' reactions couldn't have been more different. Mentos's VP of Marketing estimated the company received over ten million dollars' worth of exposure and said "We are tickled pink." But a Coca-Cola spokesperson said, "We would hope people want to drink [Diet Coke] more than try experiments with it... The craziness of Mentos... doesn't fit with our brand personality." Later, Coke tried to jump on the bandwagon, but the damage had been done.

Finally, the sixth step is to plan multiple rounds. A campaign rarely goes viral on the first attempt. An easy example: the Old Spice Guy. As viral campaigns often do, this one started on traditional media and now dances between TV and the Web.

No methodology can guarantee success, but planning around these six points increases a campaign's chances of going viral.

— Dee-Ann LeBlanc is a technology writer, editor, and journalist who covers Web-related topics involving social media and marketing, especially in the world of content management.