The Importance of Viral Marketing

The Importance of Viral Marketing (AllBusiness.com?s Chris Bjorklund interviews viral marketing expert Joseph Carrabis, founder of NextStage Evolution.)

Chris Bjorklund: You?re listening to the AllBusiness podcast. I?m Chris Bjorklund. If you?re getting this through iTunes and RSS feed or an on-line streaming media player, you have the opportunity to hear a more valuable advice from top business experts right here on AllBusiness.com. We?ll be right back after this brief message from our sponsor, comcast.

Chris Bjorklund: Today, my guest is Joseph Carrabis, founder of NextStage Evolution and columnist for imediaconnections. He?s an expert on viral marketing. Also known as word-of-mouth marketing. He?s done extensive research on how messages travel through society. He?s authored 22 books and more than 300 articles covering everything from cultural anthropology and mathematics, to martial arts, database technology, and tribal behavior. Joseph, thanks so much for being in our show today. Now, you?ve been doing some very cutting edge research on this ?word-of-mouth marketing?. And some people call it viral marketing. And I know, many of us aren?t so sure what viral marketing is. In fact when I hear that word ?viral,? I think, you know, is it contagious? Can you give us a clear working definition so we sort of all get on the same page?

Carrabis: A clear working definition probably not. But, I think, your statement about contagious is/is right there. ?Cause what we?re talking about is marketing that buy it?s very nature is really infectious. And what this means is that people are going to pass the marketing message on voluntarily much like a cold. They don?t realize they?re passing it on. They don?t realize what they?re doing. So like a biological virus, viral marketing is something that?s going to be transmitted when several factors are aligned. And those factors are the audience, the message, the product. You know, it all plays a part. You know, people who are in this field who...my estimation, my opinion don?t appreciate that to truly understand how viral marketing/word-of-mouth marketing works, you have to understand the pathogenic, biologic model. I think they?re missing out a big deal. That?ll come out in our discussion today.

Bjorklund: Well, when you talk about viral marketing, is this something that only came into play with the advent of the Internet?

Carrabis: No, actually that?s a great question. I?m not really sure when I first heard viral marketing. I believe it comes out of a concept of Nomadic and that?s something we in NextStage have been doing for a long time. A place of reference, a point of reference for your readers, your listeners, I apologize, is a book by Aaron Lynch called Thought Contagion. That was in ?96. It did a really good job of explaining the concept. And, you know, another thing to remember is that ?viral marketing? is another way of saying word-of-mouth. And word-of-mouth has been around, you know, since the Babylon.

Bjorklund: Well, you know, when I was looking for examples of word-of-mouth marketing and they talked about things like Tupperware parties as an example of sort of a or pyramid schemes.

Carrabis: The Tupperware parties anything like that is an example of word-of-mouth. Because what?s happening there is you?re getting a bunch of people together, to talk about something and they?re going to go tell friends. You know, we?re going to get a bunch of people over the house. Well that?s/that?s viral marketing done without the advent of the Internet.

Bjorklund: So, let?s talk about something you?ve just touched on which is when information spreads like wild fire. Let?s say it?s a funny thing, a political thing that goes around on...in/in your research, this is kind of what you?re starting/getting at in a new way which is analyzing why some messages take off and others don?t. What/what is your research...what are some of the things that your research tells you about that?

Carrabis: The first thing that we discovered is that viral campaigns? word-of-mouth are so audience dependable. And here?s where they break away from a biologic virus. Viral marketers haven?t had enough time evolving what they do. No offense to anybody. Evolving what they do to become custom designed for a specific market. The reason that viruses in nature work as well as they do say they have millions of years to be really specific, you know. But in the age of the Internet, you know, Internet long life span is a year and half, two years, right? So nobody these days really has had a chance, and that includes NextStage, has had a chance to truly perfect and isolate. You know, here?s where connections have to be, here?s how things have to be done. What I think needs to happen is that viral marketers, word-of-mouth marketers really need to study group dynamics, group behaviors. Here?s my bias, I have a lot of background on cultural anthropology, sociology, social psychology, and...

Bjorklund: And tribal behavior?

Carrabis: ...and tribal behavior. Yes, I bang the drum. It?s so, you know, your listeners are going to have to appreciate that I have my biases just like everybody else. Let?s go back to that biologic concept for a second. A successful virus in nature demands so many factors you align in order for it to be successful. All those factors, they can compete with each other. And it?s all based on the audience they infect, and I?ll translate what I just said into the world of marketing. Infection means who gets to transmit the message, a successful viral message. If you really like this to work, you need to be just so accessible while carrying a very specific message. Now those are two competing factors because a very specific message narrows your audience. Generally acceptable means a broad audience. The most successful viral campaign have been, and we believe will continue to be, those that are picked up and transmitted by the largest audience possible. Even though the number of people when they?re getting the message and responding to it, maybe a small subset. That?s where that?s fine tuning element needs to come in. Now, this is already something recognized on online marketing and I?m not sharing anything new with your audience. You may have visitor traffic of several hundred thousand people. But you?re only converting 1?2 percent. Congratulations. Your website is actually a minimally successful viral campaign. You didn?t think it was. But it is. It is successful in a viral standpoint. This is another element. You don?t want to consume your audience too quickly, otherwise there?s nobody left to transmit the message and nobody left to act upon it. So with viral campaigns, you want to start small and let it grow. You don?t want to just ?boom?, you know, and wipe out the entire population.

Bjorklund: Well that was one of the problems with pyramid schemes. You know, when people were selling soap and the like, after you recruited all your friends and family and they became distributors or whatever, you did run out of people to sell to. So, I can really understand what you?re saying about that.

Carrabis: I don?t know if this is something in your background. But maybe part of your listeners who are my age, God forbid. You might remember that in the back of comic books, you can send away for seed packages. And you know, you?re going to become the king of the neighborhood by distributing these seed packages and selling them to everybody in your neighborhood. Well, nine times out of ten, your mother ended up buying all the seeds from you. And 99x out of a hundred, the seeds didn?t germinate in the ground. Now, there?s a very very early example of a pyramid scheme and why it failed. It?s also a tremendous example of how viral marketing can just so totally blow up if it?s not done perfectly.

Bjorklund: Can you give a couple examples and we?re going to listen to a couple in a moment. But can you give any let?s say without a lot of specifics about them but just some things that have gone around that were virally powerful messages that were virally powerful that you?ve seen or heard?

Carrabis: Yeah. I?ll give you one that?s/that?s not a direct marketing thing and one that is a direct marketing thing. The one that?s not direct marketing, some people may remember if they read my column in imedia. I wrote about the Chris Bliss Juggling video. Now that was something that we got, right in the middle of doing our/our regional viral research. And it?s a tremendous example of a tool, a viral concept, and the thing was with this Chris Bliss video is that I?m going to send it to you because I increase my value to you by sending it to you. It made me feel good. I?m going to share it with you, you?re going to feel good. So, now I?m in with you so to speak. In/In the/In the social lexicon, you kind of owe me one ?cause I gave you a good thing. So there?s an example of power in viral concepts and one of the things that drives the viral message. So that?s/that?s a none true marketing except Chris Bliss, the guy, who?s shown juggling, got a lot of business out of it. Now let?s turn it around to a marketing thing. The Toyota, (I?m going to mispronounce the name of the car. It shows how bad I am at this.), Scion ? S-C-I-O-N. Maybe the viral campaign which they didn?t even talk about as being a viral campaign, and one of the people who documented this very well is a woman out in Houston, Texas, believe it or not, called Theresa Quantinella, on her Qviews blog. The reason this campaign work incredibly well was because it was highly focused for a specific audience that goes back to our generally accessible highly specific message element. And how this thing was transmitted within that audience, Toyota did a conscious at a conscious thing. They pulled ads for this car from TV because they knew that their audience for this car, the market for this car was not a TV audience. So they promoted the car through the net, through college campaigns, college based word-of-mouth campaigns. Boom. They understood. Here, you know, when you do it right, when somebody does it right, you have to, you know, pull your hat off to them.

Bjorklund: Yeah, give ?em the kudos. Let?s talk now about a commercial that was on YouTube. It was a piece for Rolling Rock Beer. And let?s give a listen...

Commercial: (background music) ?We maybe airing an ad this Sunday which features grown men in thongs in the workplace. After showing it off to focus groups, we are now attempting to pull the ad. But if we cannot, please consider this. The wearing of thongs by grown men is very common throughout Europe. So it?s really not that big of a deal. Rolling rock is a classic extra pale lager and we apologize in advance if this ad in any way tarnishes our great name.?

Bjorklund: OK, Joseph. Any comments on that?

Carrabis: There were those two ads. And, actually, there?s an entirely series of ads. If your listeners have the time, you want to do a little bit of research. I really suggest they go through that entire ad sequence.

Bjorklund: We also have the sound for, you know, for the ad itself. You want to hear that before we go into your comments?

Carrabis: Yeah. Yeah.

Bjorklund: Let?s do that.

Commercial: (Boss) ?Before you accept the offer, Jim. There are two things you need to know about the office.?/(Jim) ?Okay.?/(Boss) ?First, you?ll need to lose the pants.?/(Jim) ?What??/(Boss) ?Well, this is a European company. We all wear thongs.?/(Jim) ?I had no idea.?/(Other Staff) ?Here let me show you what I?m talking about.?/(Jim) ?What?s the second thing??/(Boss) ?That fridge is always filled with ice-cold Rolling Rock.?/(Jim) ?You got yourself a new VP of sales.?/(Boss) ?Everyone.../(Jim) ?So what do you wear on casual Fridays??/(Staff) ?Don?t ask.?/(Everyone laughing.)?

Bjorklund: Okay, Joseph. Anyway, this series of ads actually never aired on TV. They were designed as if they were going to be. Isn?t that right?

Carrabis: Yeah. And another thing to remember, the series of ads is the component that?s going to get transmitted the most is this supposed VP of marketing coming on and saying ?hope we screwed up?. They have the guerrilla ad, the guerrilla dancing at the pool party ad, you now. Again as you say, none of them made it to TV. So this is a pure net, pure Internet campaign. And it?s/it is a true example of just how subjective these types of campaigns can be. If your listeners go through those ads, those spots on youtube, pay attention to the comments made about them. Not just the spots themselves, but the comments made about them. This goes into something that I?ve written about before called Towards (t-o-w-a-r-d-s) and Away From in Marketing. What it touches on is how people psychologically move towards the brand or a goal or an offering. And other people with exact same information given to them, they will psychologically move away from it. And word-of-mouth, viral whatever you want to call it, the great demonstration of how closely these two psychologies are. It bore close here than any other form of marketing because they manifest on the web. Because there?s a key factor. The web is still a solitary experience. Now, we?re going to get into a little cultural anthropology here. We?re a culture that defines itself by its bonds, by its tribal and group identities within the greater population. Marketers know this. It?s called demographic. But the people inside those demographics, you know, I don?t think of myself as a 52-year old Caucasian male. Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah. You know, if, I don?t sit around all day. Well, I do cause I?m kinda weird. But most people know sit around all day thinking of themselves like a...They might define themselves as a Harvard grad or a Southern California kind of person. Or you know, I?m a workaholic. But whatever the term is, these people are defining themselves as some element or part of a larger group. And the groups can be ethnic, religious, educational, age-gender. When I?m sitting at my computer, when you?re sitting at your computer, when you listen, your listeners, you know, at their computers, sitting and listening to this, they?re usually isolated. They?re in a cube. They?re in a rooms. Sitting at a desk with privacy panels in place. They?re in a hotel room. They put it into their iPods, so that they?re kind of isolated from all around them. You?re not getting the cultural cues. Here?s an important factor. You?re not getting the cultural cues that your group or your tribe tend to give you to help you decide how to respond. You?re in a movie theater, you hear everybody around you laughing. You?re going to laugh because everybody around you is laughing. Everybody around you is crying, you?re going to cry cause everybody around you is crying. You?re going to shriek because the monster jumps out. Well, the monster jumps out and you?re all alone by yourself. Maybe you don?t shriek as much if at all. Everyone else screams, you?re responding to their screams more than you?re responding to the monster jumping out of the screen at you.

Bjorklund: Haven?t you ever seen a movie where it?s pretty empty? Where you?ve gone to a matinée and I saw Borat that way. And it wasn?t as funny to me as it was to everybody who went to the, you know, late-night showing the first week that it came out.

Carrabis: Right. Let?s put that into a context, you know, maybe people of my generation might really recognize, ?Rocky Horror.?

Bjorklund: No.

Carrabis: You couldn?t go see ?Rocky Horror? unless it?s the midnight showing. I mean it just didn?t show unless it was a midnight showing. And by God, if you were sitting on the front seats, you?re obviously a virgin. You didn?t know what the hell you were doing.

Bjorklund: Well, you touched on demographics and that maybe marketers think too narrowly about demographics. And let?s say you were talking to a marketer who wanted to create a buzz for a new magazine and they?ve decided that the target group is working women in their 40?s. Now, how might they look at some of the key factors that would go into creating some buzz for this group?

Carrabis: My first suggestion would be that, you know, if you?re thinking for example working women in their 40?s, you?re already thinking too large a market for buzz to occur successfully at least in a short term goal. It?s an excellent market to go after. But think of that as a long term goal. Get a large market like that to pay attention to a magazine, friends or on-line, it?s going to take time. Here?s what I usually suggest, is you find two or three influencer groups which are within that larger audience. And you choose these what I call the influencer groups on some criteria, I tend to go down on four of them. You know, an incredible amount about this group, not just demographic. But their cognitive responses, their behavioral responses, their motivational factor. That?s number one. Two, you need to have confidence the group?s going to respond positively. I?m not saying, you know, we?ve done our test, we?ve done our survey. You really have to go with your gut because that?s where the word-of-mouth lives. Three, of course, you have to be able to afford to market to them. But the big one, the one that will make it work is the group needs to be influencers within the greater community. I?ll give you an example. You want to go to women in their 40?s. Here?s within that influencer group, Hispanic women with a good six-figure income. They?re influencers. You have it, actually, what you have is a two-fer. You have Hispanic women, they?re going to influence other Hispanic women. And they have very specific career tracks. So you get two groups, two subgroups within that group you?re going to be influencing. Women who have been highly successful and competitive careers such as Engineering or Bio. Science. You get these inlfuencer groups to spread the message because they are influencers. Show me that. And because the people they will influence are not necessarily within their group, their subgroup. They will influence the larger group because of who they are. And/and when they create buzz within their social networks, you?ve achieved by end. And this buzz that these influencer groups will do that can be used, capitalized on in whatever other marketing efforts you have. Basically, you plant seeds on these other marketing efforts based on what?s happening in these very specific groups. Now, the time line for this, depending on so many factors that we/we really couldn?t get into here. But there are a lot of factors. But it could be 2 years or sooner. But it depends so heavily on the size of the group, how quickly it?ll spread, how many times you?ve touched these people in this group, how far these people travel. You know, it?s a very rich field of study.

Bjorklund: Now getting into a little bit more of the research that you did. I was thinking into about viral messages that keep reappearing and become annoying.

Carrabis: Yeah.

Bjorklund: And I have too many people sending me the same thing. And suddenly I?m not angry with the people who are sending it to me. I/I?m annoyed with the company that?s behind the commercial.

Carrabis: Right.

Bjorklund: Is there anyway you can control how long a message is out there? It seems like since you launched it, you know, you might not know how long a life it has.

Carrabis: You know that?s an excellent point. Some messages are going to get out there, and come back and bite people. I mean that you see that?s so often in politics. Viral messages in politics tend to be the ones that nobody meant to get out. But let?s say that you?re actually asking two questions, I think, how often can a message stay out there before it gets, you know, boring or nobody wants it anymore, and distortion. Distortion is the easier one to answer. A message will get distorted. A viral campaign can go sour unless it?s regularly maintained. The example I can give to you for that is, remember when we were all kids, we used to play that game where I?d whisper in your ear and you?d whisper in the next person?s ear, and go around the table eventually come back to me.

Bjorklund:We call that operator.

Carrabis: Oh.

Bjorklund: What d?you call that game?

Carrabis: Oh, I don?t know. It?s in the air. I have no idea. It?s been a long time since I can recall that game.

Bjorklund: Yeah. Yeah. I remember that one.

Carrabis: But, I would say, for example, the sky is blue. And by the time it got around the table, what you?d hear is this guy has booze or something. So there?s an example of how a message can get distorted. NextStage did some research just to learn how far and how fast a message would lose it?s original meaning. Well that?s what we call potency, the original meaning of the message. What we?ve learned is that the Internet is great. It really is great for maintaining a messages? potency because it?s immediate. People can get...we?re going to use the biologic potency...people can get reinfected with the original messages many times as they want whenever they want to. You know, if you want to go see that Chris Bliss video, you can go just find it again. It?s out there. Do a search. Boom. You got it again. You can bookmark it so it?s always available to you. Now, think about this, this immediacy is not true of TV or radio unless you record it something and you can play it back. But the fact that it?s not immediate, I can?t call you up and say, ?I just sent you an email and you know, open it up and look at what I?m showing you?. It?s going to be ?I saw this thing last night. Have you ever seen this ad?? And now, you have to go through your cognitive processes, remember we talked about cognitive, behavioral effect, motivational...here we go...So, TV, radio, not so much print, print? and print is still king in a lot of ways. Print is better on the individual level. But it?s not so good in the, what we call the social level cause the only way for me to share something with you, you know, that is to spread the infection, is to make sure that you have it, hence the value of newspapers. Newspapers tend to be dying, you know. People are not spending as much time with newspapers. But print is still good because if I know, you get Time magazine and I get Time magazine. I could call you up and say ?did you read the latest issue of Time? Did you see what was in the newspaper today? Now, did you see this, did you see that...so print allows individual immediacy but not necessarily the group. Okay, the whole world changes around the web. I can email you. I can call you. Now, we?re going to go even higher, of more value. And this is where the purest form if you will of social networking takes place. It?s what we call Smart Moms. The listeners are familiar already with this concept. People using their cellphones to virally spread messages and instructions, whatever. Text messaging to each other. Here is marketing around the concept of a Smart Mom. It?s a fascinating thing to watch from my background. The challenge of the Smart Mom making that work is the size of the individual?s social network. And so many cellphone companies, their providers, their cellphone service providers, give you a perk for getting people you know into your social network hence, into their services. They?re rewarding you for being a social butterfly. And the reason I say, a butterfly, it?s, I?m not trying to put anybody down, I?m just saying. From an anthropology study, we know that the largest group of, you know, an individual really can be insignificant social contact with about 65-70 people. Again it goes back to the size of the tribal village. When groups get larger than that, subgroups, sub-tribes, will tend to emerge. And that?s not a good or bad thing. It?s really what happens. I?ll give you an example, a small high school or college. It?s graduating class of 35 to 50 people. Every student knows every other student. Everybody?s on a first name basis. They probably had direct interaction at some point in time. So, small group, everybody knows each other. Good social network, very strong. How many graduating class goes to 50 to 70 people? Not that much larger. In fact, you may still know everybody by their first name. But you have to think a bit before you can state their name for sure. Maybe you worked with a project on them at some point in time. But after the project was finished, it?s just a friendly, polite ?hello? as you pass in the hallway. Let?s bring it up again increasing the size of the network. And this place heavily into viral campaigns/word-of-mouth campaigns. You make the graduating class, 75 to 100 people. The high school or the college will start to recognize unique areas as scholarship participation. And this shows up in your yearbook pictures, the club pictures, the most likely two photos and such. Give me another example, I?m on a business-social networking site, and there are some people on this site that have over 500 connections. That?s impressive, 500 connections. They know 500 people. But as someone with my education and background, I know that many of those people on that network are purely business contacts and that?s fine. Except that at the end of the day, here it is again, the social network, the viral, the word-of-mouth, very direct contact/word-of-mouth, ?I have to tell you?. The word-of-mouth to work, viral, ?I have to somehow be in direct contact with you?. Direct line of touch with you for this to work. You know, they have 500 things, fine, at the end of the day, especially in higher level business, it?s personal. Sales is personal. Buzz marketing, viral marketing, word-of-mouth is totally personal. As if I, even if I, my method of touching you is email, okay. My method of reaching out to you/directly reaching out to you is email, and you don?t know me then SPAM. Okay. So bring this all the way around, goes back to looking for the right influencers for your product, for your service. Now the other thing was, how long should a message be out there? My take on that is either until the market is saturated or until the audiences are immune. And there are ways to calculate both. How long both would take and the best strategy, this is what I share with clients...the best strategy, I tell them to pay attention to comments. You know, Robin Williams, the comedian...leave the audience wanting more. Both market saturation and audience immunity, basically mean there?s no longer anybody out there who wants to talk about what you?re trying to get done.

Bjorklund: Enough already.

Carrabis: Yeah, exactly.

Bjorklund: Enough already. And have a sense for that.

Carrabis: Yeah.

Bjorklund: I have a feeling that we?re just kind of a scratching the surface of all the interesting research your group has done. And I think that I would like to wrap this up with asking you, what is your best advice to someone who is planning a viral marketing campaign? If you could/if you could give us a couple of last thoughts.

Carrabis: Oh, my...

Bjorklund: Oh, impossible.

Carrabis: My best last thought is that you folks should hire me out there. You should call NextStage, and have us do something for you. But let me/let me offer in the last few seconds, what I think would be a great money get away for your listeners and that?s ?if you think of products or services, which have had no social contagion or impact factor. They didn?t allow one person to share something with another person. You?re looking at things which the audience became immune to, which have no viral component, which won?t work, for example eBooks. Considering the others at the end of the scale are the iPod, BMW, product brands. The product/these products brand the owner. So, when I?m driving my BMW or listening in my iPod. I?m automatically sharing that experience with other brand owners. By just plugging in my iPod when I?m on the train coming into my office, or I?m walking on the street, other people with iPods. Boom. I?m connected too. There?s the social element, so we?re if you?re designing a buzz campaign, word-of-mouth, viral campaign, it needs to be about something that people will recognize as sharable. That?s what it?s about.

Bjorklund: Good. Now. Before we go, I?d like you to tell us how to find your blog.

Carrabis: Bizmediascience (b-i-z-m-e-d-i-a-s-c-i-e-n-c-e.com). I warn you ahead of time, it?s/ it goes everywhere from very heavy research to other stuff whatever I feel like. And then you know, come to our website, NextStageevolution.com. We usually post our research there as well. We?re always looking for companies that are interested in working with us to further our research. So, it can be a good thing.

Bjorklund: My guest today has been Carrabis, an expert on viral messaging what some people call viral marketing or word-of-mouth marketing. To hear more interviews with business experts, log on to our website at AllBusiness.com. And if you want to give us feedback on this show or recommend guests, here?s our email, podcasts@AllBusinees.com.