April 2007

I have of various reasons had a lot of discussions lately on viral marketing and stickiness. It is interesting to look around on the web these days and you find numerous examples of sites claiming to be viral and using these techniques to build their communities. Very few seem to have thought it through though.

I think viral marketing is conceptually simple yet it requires some fingertip feeling to do it successfully. It is something we all can relate to, something that is personal and something very intuitive and thus you just want to and can share it instantaneously with your friends. It sticks to your mind like glue to your finger. You just remember it without taking notes. You might forget a few details but the concept is never lost. The best examples are urban legends. We have all heard about the lady who tried the dry the cat in the microwave. I haven’t met a single person who doesn’t instantly start to discuss it. In music it is these annoying phrases and melodies, which just doesn’t go away (even though you sometimes want them to).

Anyhow, I sometime ago spoke to one of the professors at Stanford on another matter. We were talking about water issues on the border between Mexico and USA. He said that one of the main problems they faced when solving the issue was to explain the abstract law. The moment they started to explain the situation in personal stories they reached success. He explains the concept as embodying thoughts, giving the story legs. The impersonal abstract thoughts transformed into something simple, relatable and credible. It was not big, difficult words anymore. I got another example in a speech by another Stanford professor on environmental stability; he used an analogy to explain child mortality in Africa. It all came down to, maybe not that surprising, the availability of water. Sounds simple right? He put it like this to exemplify the complexity of the problem: “How would you prioritize 4 liters of water per day? You need it to cook and you need to drink it. Would you prioritize your personal hygiene? If so, what would you choose?” The effect got bigger as he took four of our water bottles and put them in front of him. Instantaneously, everyone realized the problem and the issues faced.

Viral marketing is about the same. You package your message to something everyone can relate to and the word will spread. A pretty package is not necessary. It is the message which should stick, not the presentation of the message even though it might help. I did my own little viral marketing example last summer during the last conflict in Lebanon. I sent out an email, to be honest not very polished, that I wanted people to start sharing their stories via cell phones to a blog I have set up. It took only 1.5 days before I got the first reports from Haifa and Beirut and the readership grew beyond my wildest expectations. The email was sticky as we all could relate to the message in it. It was simple. “Please tell people in Lebanon and Israel that they can tell their stories to this blog simply by sending one SMS or MMS.” I haven’t met anyone who hasn’t wanted to hear what the people felt and experienced there or anywhere else in the world where conflicts are or closeness in the society rules. There is the need for the emotional element of the messages, but also further exemplifies the need of simplicity.

A Stanford Graduate School of Business Professor Chip Heath talks about branding stickiness in his book “Made to Stick” and he concludes the key attributes (my comments after the dash) to be:

• Simplicity – simple messages are more easily remembered than abstract equations if anyone doubted that.
• Unexpectedness – who doesn’t remember the first Matrix-trailer? Who didn’t just want to see the movie just to get that answer: What is the Matrix?
• Credibility – If the message is not credible, why would anyone pass it on? Please do remember that it is the current credibility that matters.
• Emotions – We are emotional creatures and want to see especially emotional or even controversial material regardless if we agree or disagree. Even if you hate the reality show, you will watch it, just so that you can tell everyone else why it is so bad.
• Stories – messages gets passed on by people to people everywhere. You just don’t have the time to tell an introduction, method, results, conclusion and discussion over a beer or a coffee. Your friends will most likely go to sleep or start to play with their cellphone and there goes that evening.

This has very high relevance for building online and real communities, viral brand building and social media. Community building is easier online as the sharing of information is much faster. (Of course there are cases where you have communities supported by real communities, or vice versa.) Why is stickiness the central component of any social media site? It really is pretty simple. Communities are about people, and then I am not talking about the creators. My good friend Tom Calthrop once said to me when we started to discussed the permission system inside AroundMe: “Erik, social communities is about what your members want, not what you want”. I do think it is one of the main wisdoms of the online media of today, but very often forgotten. The community will tell where you want to go and especially social media sites such as MySpace, YouTube but let us not forget the very often forgotten amazing social media channel email has been formed by the users. It also opens up for viral marketing.

Communities are about people. People easily relate to other people. Moreover the ones who can convince you the best are your friends and family. Why not use them to market your site or help you build your community? (It is very much like recursion in computer science yet simpler. You only need to worry about the first step, then pass it on!) Now we come to a piece that is very central in viral marketing and why the simple and relatable message is so important.

Let us step back and think of a well-known psychology phenomena.

Many have done the experiment of the 10 people chain where the first person tells a story to the second, the second to the third and so forth. Most of the times, the story the 10^th person hears has very little to do with the first person story. Why? We usually don’t put so much care into telling stories to be passed on to multiple people, and thus it seldom is simple and contains too many details. The key is to tell the story where the listener relates to the story regardless of who that is, the persons background or education.

Even if you know how your friends and family will be convinced, you need to make sure that the message sticks well-enough for them to be able to pass it on where the important pieces are there. A good friend of mine told me recently: “Stick to one message, not several. Erik, you can handle many messages, most people cannot.” So true.

So how do you do this?

What I have realized lately is something very simple. You as a viral marketer must know your business or objective that well that your misconceptions and uncertainties are not passed on to the rest of the chain. Misconceptions and uncertainties propagate, just like the errors in numerical solutions of equations. If you have misconceptions or uncertainties make sure that your message doesn’t contain even pieces of them or almost worse will change when you get the answer to them. The later is the main challenge, but the successful sites on the web have all these elements. Look at Google who basically said “Here you can search” and their UI was matching the message. I can still remember when I got the link to Google over ICQ then from a friend. (The same friend convinced me that MSN messenger was better. More viral marketing.) When I got to the site it was impossible not to realize what to do. I do still doubt this was an intentional UI. I think it is more an artifact of the fact that Google was more focused on the backend rather than the front end simply based on the fact that they developed algorithms for the ranking of pages. A textbox and a button with search was the only thing needed to as fast as possible get to the list of search entries. Looking back, it is a brilliant UI yet not planned as far as I believe.

It brings up to another attribute of the message. It needs to be consistent with the rest of your organization, the content of your website, the behavior of your staff, your user interface, your technology solution and so forth. Don’t tell the user something you are not as you will not keep misguided users, and even worse from a business perspective. They are very less likely to come back again. If you tell the users you are something you better be that to. The ultimate example of successful viral marketing YouTube basically said: “Hey guys, here you can upload videos…” again with a matching, simple UI. They never told you which videos to upload, just videos and that is the brilliant move. They could adapt to their users whatever they chose to and the success is then history. They also listened to the users as they enabled sharing via email and related videos, which really created their explosive growth. What I am missing in the attributes for sticky messages by Professor Chip Heath is the consistency of both your brand and message. It can be claimed to be covered by the credibility, but I do think it is a separate attribute.

You can say that all messages you send out from your organization must be packaged exactly as your viral marketing message. We all are aware the key in branding is the consistency in your interaction with your users, or else your users get confused. Viral branding is about letting you users build your brand. If you are uncareful when you specify your “viral message”, they might build a brand you didn’t intend. The main problem with viral marketing is that you cannot really prove success nor check if your message sticks before you try it out.

Viral marketing is the future yet it is completely different from regular marketing. The success rate is much higher than normal marketing if done correctly though.