5 Viral Marketing Campaign Features I Learned from Clients

I’ve been static from this site, rather shamefully but not without reason, I have a pretty hectic lifestyle these days and am barely getting enough time in to blog myself. Although I’m working on it, and with my new website design out of the way I am going to be contributing more time over here at Collective Thoughts and hope you guys enjoy what I have to say.

To make a long story short, I have my own company, but work full-time for a large internet marketing agency in south africa, and that’s where I get to work with some very large and very interesting clients. Being the Social Media Manager, it may come as a surprise that not all campaign ideas we pushed with were necessarily mine, and whilst I knew of these ‘ideas’ I hadn’t thought about putting them into play at the time. So without further ado, here’s what I learnt:

1. Give something to Charity

One site I worked with, their campaign had already decided to donate money for every ‘vote’ in a competition that was received on the site for images that were uploaded. I found that when promoting the competition, this was a great angle to look at and really ‘spurred’ people to help share the competition and helped with titles for those niche social news websites.

2. Get others to do the promoting

Basically what that means is involve users in a way that they have to promote it if they want to gain anything from it. In the competition above, people talked everywhere about the images they uploaded to a site in that it far amassed the traffic we were sending just from general social media marketing. When you get a large number of people wanting to talk about something on their blogs, myspace and facebook profiles you know you are onto a winner.

3. Use their Offline Presence for Online Gain

One client is a drinks manufacturer, one of the largest in the world actually who sell cartoned juice. They came up with the online idea themselves and just wanted us to help spread the word. One of the best ideas I think they had though to get some real attention was to also advertise the online part of this on their actual product. They had such a wide audience available that this was an instant success. You just need to make sure that you are actually promoting something that people want to get involved with rather than something average and boring.

4. Use Media Buy to get People where you want them

This might seem a little strange, as ‘media buy’ really isn’t social media marketing, but if you think about it, it actually works quite well. If the place you want to get people is likely to draw them in, get them involved and help them spread the word. The a small amount of media buy on a relevant blogs and forums can then help build up the conversation by originally get as many people as possible to know about the idea. This is something I personally hadn’t dabbled too much in but I seen that clients were already doing this and it was having a great effect.

5. Use Technology to appeal to the current ‘Buzz’

I had never been in a position where I could ask for someone to develop this tool, and this widget and that application. In a situation where clients had larger budgets and bigger teams, I could already see them creating tools and items that I would deem link worthy without any of my input. One company created tools and unique site features that related to the ‘green / environment’ buzz that is going around the web, and as you can imagine this was quite easy to promote.

Glen Allsopp can also be found on the ViperChill reputation management blog and look out for more of his posts on Collective-Thoughts in the future!