Viral marketing of digital products using social media - MBA Dissertation

Kapil Gupta

Viral marketing of digital products using social media

Dissertation presented for the Degree of Masters of Business

Administration at the University of Edinburgh Business School, May 2011

MBA Dissertation Page 1

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my supervisor, Tony Kinder, for all of the help and guidance he has

given me over the course of the project, from the initial idea through the research and

writing stages through to the conclusion. It would have been impossible to complete this

project without his assistance.

I would also like to thank all of the interviewees, whose experiences and insights were

invaluable in writing this report:

Rachel Armitage

Jenny Herbison

Andrew Burnett

Colin Gilchrist

Tera Dargavel

I would also like to thank all my friends and colleagues who tolerated me while I incessantly

talked about viral marketing and who sometimes even helped me brainstorm some ideas.

Warm thanks to all of you,

Kapil Gupta

Edinburgh, May 2011


Abstract

Improvements in hardware and software technologies like high speed internet, cloud

computing, smaller and faster chips, have made social networking and mobile devices

ubiquitous, which has in turn created a huge opportunity in digital products and services

market. Marketers, in trying to use traditional word-of-mouth marketing concepts online for

- aka viral marketing – for their digital products are realising that there is the potential of

exponential growth that can be achieved very quickly and very cheaply when compared to

using more traditional marketing channels. This report attempts to explore how marketers

could use viral marketing to market their digital products and realise this potentially

exponential growth.

In answering this question, this report draws on the results of primary and secondary

research, including four interviews conducted in March and April 2011 with professionals

from organisations dealing in digital products and social media marketing. Among the topics

covered in these interviews were identifying who can use viral marketing, strategic issues

surrounding viral marketing, specific characteristics that a products needs to have to be

considered for viral marketing, creating and executing a viral marketing campaign, and how

to make a viral marketing campaign sustainable.

The research showed that all aspects of an organisation need to come together and work in

tandem to potentially achieve an exponential growth using a viral marketing campaign -

from defining an overall business and marketing strategy, looking at company’s capabilities,

putting crisis management in place, developing the right product which is social spread

friendly, finding the right influencers in the relevant market channels, seeding these

influencers, monitoring the campaign, engaging with customers as they provide positive and

negative feedback, and all this while building momentum to a point where campaign

potentially goes viral.

Research also shows the marketers need to be aware of the negative aspects of viral

marketing, as it could be catastrophic to a brand.


Drawing on these findings, the report then presents the five areas that marketers should

consider while using viral marketing to market digital products:

Overall business and marketing strategy

Human and system capabilities

Finding the right Influencers

Designing and developing a brilliant product

Creating and managing a campaign

Sustainability of viral marketing campaign


Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................................................... 1

Abstract .............................................................................................................................................................. 2

1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................................ 6

1.1 Digital products ............................................................................................................................. 7

1.2 Social media and viral marketing ........................................................................................... 8

1.3 Viral marketing of digital products using social media ................................................. 9

2. Literature Review................................................................................................................................ 10

2.1 What is Social Media? ................................................................................................................ 10

2.2 Social media classification ...................................................................................................... 11

2.3 What does Social Media means for marketers? .............................................................. 12

2.4 What is Viral Marketing? ......................................................................................................... 13

2.5 Advantages / Disadvantages of VM. .................................................................................... 14

2.6 Identifying the target audience for a viral marketing campaign. ............................ 15

2.7 Creating and executing a VM campaign - main characteristics. ............................... 17

2.8 Measuring effectiveness of a VM Campaign ..................................................................... 19

2.9 How to make a Viral Marketing campaign sustainable? ............................................. 20

2.10 Summary.................................................................................................................................... 20

3. Methodology.......................................................................................................................................... 22

3.1 Research approach ..................................................................................................................... 22

3.2 Data collection methods .......................................................................................................... 23

3.3 Interview subjects ...................................................................................................................... 24

3.4 Secondary sources ..................................................................................................................... 25

3.5 Data analysis ................................................................................................................................. 26

3.6 Research limitations .................................................................................................................. 26

3.7 Ethical considerations .............................................................................................................. 27

4. Empirical Material .............................................................................................................................. 28

4.1 Importance of strategy ............................................................................................................. 28

4.2 Important factors for viral messages .................................................................................. 30

4.3 Importance of influencers ....................................................................................................... 32

4.4 Executing a campaign ............................................................................................................... 35

4.5 Sustainability of a VM campaign ........................................................................................... 37

5. Analysis ................................................................................................................................................... 40

5.1 Viral Marketing ............................................................................................................................ 41

5.2 Strategy........................................................................................................................................... 42

5.3 Capabilities .................................................................................................................................... 43

5.4 Product ........................................................................................................................................... 44

5.5 Influencers .................................................................................................................................... 44

5.6 Creating a campaign .................................................................................................................. 45

5.7 Campaign management ............................................................................................................ 46

5.8 Sustainability ................................................................................................................................ 48

5.9 Summary ........................................................................................................................................ 48

6. Conclusion .............................................................................................................................................. 54

6.1 Summary of results .................................................................................................................... 54

6.2 Personal reflections ................................................................................................................... 56

6.3 Contribution to existing knowledge .................................................................................... 57


6.4 Business lessons.......................................................................................................................... 57

6.5 Further research ......................................................................................................................... 58

Bibliography ................................................................................................................................................... 59

Appendix A ..................................................................................................................................................... 66

Appendix B ..................................................................................................................................................... 72

Appendix C ...................................................................................................................................................... 81

Appendix D ..................................................................................................................................................... 89

Appendix E ...................................................................................................................................................... 93

Appendix F ...................................................................................................................................................... 94


1. Introduction

There is an explosion happening in the digital world, and Social Media is responsible for it.

Not a day goes by without hearing something new about how hundreds of millions of

people are engaging in social media. Here are some examples:

Facebook (Mashable 2010) (Mashable 2011)

o has almost 600m users.

o 750 million photos were uploaded on Facebook on the new years (2010-

11) weekend.

o is valued at $75 billion.

YouTube (OnlineSchools 2010)

o streamed more than 700 billion videos in 2010

o 25 hours of content of was uploaded every minute in 2010

Twitter

o has 175 million registered users

o 100 million tweets daily.

Venture Capitalists and other investors are flogging to invest in new and innovative social

media companies and device manufacturers are continuously coming up with new and

sophisticated devices to provide a platform for people to engage in social media while on

the move.


The recent technological advancements - in mobile devices, multi-touch screens, cloud

computing, and the advancements in the way we interact with the devices – has allowed the

companies to deliver content and services in very easy, fast and interactive ways.

With more and more people using social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, YouTube

etc., the way these products are being marketed is changing as well. For example, using viral

marketing, KIK - a cross platform mobile phone application was downloaded 1 million times

in just 15 days after its launch (KIK 2010). In another example, Viber was able to achieve 1

million downloads in just 5 days (Appchronicles 2010). It has since amassed 10 million

(Techcrunch 2011) downloads.

This paper will look at how companies developing digital products could use social media to

develop and execute a viral marketing campaign.

1.1 Digital products

In 2002, Hui et al (Hui & Chau 2002) classified Digital products into three categories:

Tools and Utilities that assist user to accomplish specific goals or tasks

Content based products whose value lies in the information content

Online services that provide access to useful resources like server connections as

well as online utilities that assist users in accomplishing specific tasks

Since then, with the rise and adaptation of Web 2.0 technologies, digital products and

services have seen an explosion - both in terms of the numbers of products and services,

and the number of consumers using them i.e. mobile platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Blogs,

YouTube, LinkedIn etc.), mobile applications (>300,000 apps on Apple AppStore with 10

billion downloads), Cloud computing etc.

This market is set to grow exponentially over the coming 5-10 years (Venturebeat 2010).

Below are some data that support this trend:


More and more mobile devices are being developed. For example -Motorola Xoom

tablet, HP TouchPad etc.

The vast majority of developing world yet to adopt smart phones (India hasn’t even

start deploying 3G infrastructure yet)

New business and revenue models are continuously emerging (Mobile Ad market

was worth $877 million in the US alone and is predicted to rise to $3bn by 2013 (Kim

2010) )

The smart phone penetration is growing rapidly (Alarcon 2009) (Blandford 2010)

This change is happening at a fast pace (Perez 2010) and there is little written about the

particular challenges in marketing the digital products, hence the reason to look at Digital

products specifically in this paper.

1.2 Social media and viral marketing

Internet has now become a virtual social world where we meet our friends and family, make

new friends, engage in conversation about work-life experience – including buying products

and services and the resulting experiences – engage in marketplace and listen to people we

trust when making buying decisions.

When it comes to making decisions, people have always been influenced by their peers,

group leaders and other influential people in society whose opinion they value. Marketers

have long used Word of Mouth (WOM) marketing to influence the buying decisions in the

physical world. With the advent of Social Media, this conversation has gone online, and has

become global as there are no geographical barriers when it comes to the internet. There

are now hundreds of millions (Bloch 2010) of people using Social Media making

conversations, posting their feelings and opinions, and influencing others with their ideas

and experiences. WOM marketing in this virtual world has a new name, called Viral

Marketing. However, virtual nature of this social conversation presents unique challenges to

viral marketing.


From an organisation’s point of view, the key challenge is to assess whether it has the

bandwidth to deal with a sudden rush of people wanting to buy its products i.e. can it fulfil

every request? Can it provide a positive customer experience to all its customers? It also

needs to ensure that all its ducks are in a row within the organisation to deal with the

sudden influx. For example, there is no point marketing department using viral marketing if

the IT department cannot deal with a sudden rise in number of downloads.

From the marketers point of view, the key challenges are - How do you find who to target

among the vast number of people interacting online, especially the ones who would both

like your product and influence significant number of others to buy them? What do you do

to grab their attention and engage with them? How do you correctly assess people’s

emotions about the products and services from the text they use online? How do you

measure whether marketing campaign is working and adding to the bottom line? And

finally, how do you make it sustainable?

1.3 Viral marketing of digital products using social media

In order to help improve the overall understanding of viral marketing of digital products

using social media, this paper will attempt to answer the following research question:

How is viral marketing of digital products different from that of viral messages (e.g.

YouTube videos)?

What are the steps an organisation needs to take while considering, designing and

executing a viral marketing campaign using social media

Once a viral marketing campaign is successful, what should an organisation do to

sustain the customer’s interest?


2. Literature Review

2.1 What is Social Media?

Social Media is the commonly known term for the Web2.0 technologies that enable the

Internet users to generate and exchange content (Kaplan & Haenlein 2010) through desktop

and mobile devices.

With the increase in consumption of the mass media and internet, the decline of community

activity has been one of the dominant social trends of recent decades across the world’s

advanced economies (Putnam 2000). American social scientist Robert Putnam wrote about

this trend, but also saw the potential of revival of these communities through internet

(Putnam 2000). The Cluetrain Manifesto (Levine 2009), the 1999 internet marketing book

also made a similar point in that it claimed people were drawn to the internet because of

“the promise of voice and thus of authentic self (Levine 2009).” Social media’s popularity

(Mashable 2011) over the last few years seems to provide confirmation to this as people

continue to reach out to connect to other human beings and in the process accept the

technological advancements that are thrown at them.

The term Social Media was coined around 2004 with the launch of social networking

websites like MySpace (2003) and Facebook (2004); however the concept of social

networking can be traced back to almost 30 years ago when the first email was sent

between two computers. Advancements in technologies like Internet, network

infrastructure, Web 2.0, mobile devices etc. have since empowered every internet user to

create their own content - be it video, blog, opinions etc. - and share between their online

social networks. Social Media allows people to stay connected with many more people –

friends, families, business associates etc. - even across multiple continents, than was

possible in the past.

From a business point of view, social media is becoming an important platform to

understand the market needs, study competition, and leverage the platforms to launch and

market products and services and to maintain customer relationships. Marketers are


actively listening into the conversation on the social networks and analysing the impact of

their brands. In December 2010, the editorial in the Harvard Business Review suggested:

“Companies have traditionally spent up to 90% of their marketing

budget on advertising and retail promotions. Yet the biggest influence

in purchasing decision is often other people’s recommendations”

According to Brian Dunn, CEO of Best Buy, “Social Media are where the national

conversation is taking place today and either you are part of that conversation or you are

not” (Dunn 2010).

Social Media Marketing is set to become an integral part of every company’s integrated

marketing mix in the coming months and years.

2.2 Social media classification

In order to find the right customers for targeting a marketing campaign - for a company,

product, or brand - or to look for customers, especially the opinion leaders in social

networks talking about specific brand, marketers need to understand which social media

platforms to focus on. According to Kaplan et al (Kaplan & Haenlein 2010), there are six

different types of Social Media: collaborative projects, blogs and microblogs, content

communities, social networking sites, virtual game worlds, and virtual communities.

Further to this, Bernoff (Bernoff 2010) classify the types of social media users as – creators,

critics, collectors, joiners, spectators and inactives. It is important for marketers to

understand that social network users quite often use multiple platforms while

communicating. For example, a user might post a video on YouTube and share its links and

opinions through Twitter, Facebook etc.

These classifications are important for marketers in that they not only need to target the

social networks or the social media users that are relevant to their business, but also choose

the right management and monitoring tools that link to specific social network datasets.

However, marketers need to be wary of the fact that social media is evolving rapidly and


new types of networks are quite likely to emerge in the future and they need to keep

themselves abreast on this area.

Failure to recognise the relevant networks or the type of users on social networks could end

up in marketers spending a lot or time of effort with very little in the way of the results. This

is quite a common practice as marketers that do not know understand social media tend to

shoot in the dark and very often fail to get the desired result for themselves and their

organisations.

2.3 What does Social Media means for marketers?

Gerzema and Lebar (Gerzema & Edward 2008) argue in their book The Brand Bubble that

since consumers trust each other more than they trust marketing information, social media

has altered the trust equation for brands by allowing the customers to create and exchange

their own contents. This means the customers can freely exchange positive and negative

perceptions about a brand in a connected world where these perceptions can spread like a

wild fire. For example, Groupon’s 2011 Superbowl advertisement was met by huge backlash

on Twitter, so much so that the CEO of Groupon had to explain their reasoning behind

choosing those specific advertisements on the company blog (Andrew 2011).

The technological advancements and increased connectivity online and offline have also

allowed an unprecedented number of new brands to be introduced in recent years globally

(Gerzema & Lebar 2009). Gerzema et al (Gerzema & Lebar 2009) discovered that consumer

attitudes towards all sizes and segments of brands were in serious decline. They observed

significant drops in key measures of brand value - ‘top of mind’ awareness, trust, regard and

admiration – aka the Brand Equity. The three major problems with the brands, they argue,

are:

1. Excess capacity

2. Lack of creativity

3. Loss of trust


The advent of Social Media has made a marketers life a lot more challenging. It can be

argued that it has become much harder to capture and sustain consumers’ attention and

interest in specific brands. In an attempt to address this issue, Gerzema et al (Gerzema &

Lebar 2009) propose a new quality to the brand, called ‘energised differentiation’ I.e. Brands

that reflect brand’s energy - communicate excitement, dynamism and creativity.

Social media does provide an opportunity to connect with the consumers and understand

their specific needs. Social media marketing provides unique opportunity to the marketers

to create ‘energised differentiation’ that Gerzema et al (Gerzema & Lebar 2009) talk about.

In order to do this, marketers needs to incorporate social media in the overall marketing

strategy of the company.

2.4 What is Viral Marketing?

Viral Marketing is the intentional influencing of consumer-to-consumer communication by

professional marketing techniques (Kozinets et al. 2010). It is also otherwise known as word-

of-mouth marketing (WOMM), buzz marketing and guerrilla marketing. Wilson (Wilson

2005) describes viral marketing as:

“Any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing

message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in

the message’s exposure and influence”.

People like to share their experiences with one another – the restaurants where they had

lunch, the movie they saw – and when the experiences are favourable, the

recommendations can snowball, resulting in runaway success (Dye 2000). In her paper,

Larsen (Larson 2009) argues that viral marketing through social media is the new format of

the traditional word-of-mouth marketing, only exponentially faster. It enables the word-of-

mouth to spread at the speed of thought (Ferguson 2008). In that sense, it can also be

translated as ‘networked enhanced WOM’ (Datta, Chowdhury & Chakraborty 2005).


One of the earliest examples of online viral marketing campaigns was created by Microsoft

Hotmail (squidoo n.d.) - by including a simple hyperlink “Get your free Hotmail account” at

the bottom of every email sent out by existing users. It allowed a simple way for the users to

action and create their own Hotmail account. Hotmail increased its customer base to over

12 million in just 18 months a result. Radder (Radder 2002) argues that the new and

improved technology has provided the customer an opportunity to demand and experience

for a personal, interactive and relational experience.

VM in social networks started with videos being posted on YouTube. For example, the

chicken viral video by Burger King in 2004 received over 20m hits (Clifford-Marsh 2009) .

However, these days VM campaigns are more integrated campaigns that are tied to other

more traditional forms of media. For example, the campaign for the movie The Dark Knight

incorporated billboards, commercials, social networks, fake websites, email blasts, online

puzzles etc. The movie grossed over $1bn worldwide (Readon 2009) .

It seems to be the case that the presence of millions of consumers on social networks, who

also share their experiences and views on brands they like or dislike, presents a unique

opportunity to the marketers – to not only understand the customers perspective of their

brands, but also to influence their perceptions quite rapidly using viral marketing concepts.

2.5 Advantages / Disadvantages of VM.

When looking to buy products/services almost 76% people rely on other people’s opinions

for product recommendations, versus 15% on advertising (Qualman 2009). Yang et al (Yang

& Allenby 2003) showed that the geographically defined network of consumers is more

useful than the demographic network for explaining consumer behaviour in purchasing

Japanese cars. Hill et al (Hill, Provost & Volinsky 2006) found that adding network

information, specifically whether a potential customer was already talking to an existing

customer, was predictive of the chances of adoption of a new phone service option. For the

customers linked to a prior customer, the adoption rate was 3–5 times greater than the

baseline. These recommendations come from people who are opinions leaders or someone


who has influence within a community. In order to capture the attention of these

influencers, marketers have to use targeted marketing campaigns.

VM campaign is a lower-cost option when compared to mass media marketing. It also allows

the marketers to target specific customers and has a high and rapid response rate. It

appears to be quite a straight forward option for the organisations and marketers to adopt

viral marketing strategies; however, the outcome of VM is hard to predict (Watts, Peretti &

Frumin 2007). Mass marketing, on the other hand, has a far wider reach and marketers can

get predictable returns from such campaigns. Watts et al (Watts, Peretti & Frumin 2007)

argue that combining viral marketing with mass marketing, in what they call Big Seed

Marketing, would allow marketers to get a more predictable return.

Marketers should also carefully consider the fact that viral marketing campaigns become

unmanageable once they gain a certain momentum. This can be a major problem for

marketers, especially if the campaign doesn’t have the desired outcome.

In a study in 2001, Bowman et al (Bowman & Narayandas 2001) found that self-reported

loyal customers were more likely to talk to others about the products when they were

dissatisfied, but, interestingly, they were not more likely to talk to others when they were

satisfied. To avoid this, marketers need to carefully monitor the early stages of a VM

campaign when they may have some control and there is an opportunity to take corrective

measures.

The low cost of social media marketing and the potential to reach and influence millions of

people through personal recommendation seems to be a very lucrative option for

marketers. However, if not managed properly, such campaigns also have the potential to

get out of hand very quickly and become unmanageable. Marketers need to keep this mind

and take a balanced approach.

2.6 Identifying the target audience for a viral marketing

campaign.


As described previously, internet users engage in social media on a variety of platforms.

Marketing messages and meaning on these platforms are not unidirectional, but rather are

exchanged among members of these social media networks.

In a study, Kozinets (Kozinets et al. 2010) found that motivations to participate are complex

and culturally embedded, shaped by communal interests and communicative orientations

and charged with moral hazard. The first challenge for the marketers is to identify the

networks that are relevant to their brand or campaign.

The social network models have traditionally suffered from the lack of data to analyse the

predictive nature of the network. However, Domingos (Domingos 2005) argues that massive

amount of data is now available on very large social networks, allowing the marketers to

build models of the individuals involved in the social media. Data on all the nodes in the

social networks now allows for an unprecedented level of analysis, understanding,

predictions and their productive use in decision-making. The analysis allows for new models

to be created that could be used to create VM plans that maximise positive WoM among

customers.

Similar to any social network in the physical world, influential users play a crucial role in

customers’ buying decisions in online social networks. Armano (Armano 2010), in his blog

wrote that sharing useful information that might help someone within your network scores

you points and builds equity. Domingos (Domingos 2005) defines network value of the

customer as, “the expected increase in sales to others that result from marketing to that

customer”. The second challenge for the marketers is to identify the customers with high

network value. While identifying the target audience, the key question they should ask

themselves is, “If we market to this particular set of customers, what is the expected profit

from the whole network, after the influence of those customers has propagated

throughout” (Domingos 2005).

Marketers should be aware that it is not just about numbers. The context in which these

numbers are used is a lot more crucial. Online users listen to other users for variety of

reasons and do not necessarily get influenced by everything they say. For example,


celebrities usually have most number of followers on social networks, but they do not

necessarily influence their followers’ buying decisions.

The amount of data now available on the internet where users freely share ideas about

brands and the reasons behind their choices they make as consumers allows the researchers

to perform insightful analysis. Kozinets (Kozinets 1998) coined the term Netnography - a

branch of Ethnography that analyses the free behaviour of individuals on internet using

marketing research techniques to provide useful insights. In order to identify which specific

influencers to use as seeds, marketers need to use these research techniques across the

targeted social networks, in addition to the short listed high network value customers.

The literature seems to fall short in that there doesn’t seem to be the recognition that

consumers use a variety of languages, slangs, abbreviations etc. when expressing their

opinions about brands on their social networks. The idea of using these as insights is all well

and good, but there aren’t systems out there yet that are capable of accurately judging the

mood of the consumer, especially when they deviate from the standard language rules.

Marketers need to be very careful when using such automated tools as the results can be

quite deceptive.

2.7 Creating and executing a VM campaign - main

characteristics.

The researchers view on whether a viral marketing campaign can be orchestrated seems to

be divided. Watts (Watts, Peretti & Frumin 2007) argue that it is very hard – if not

impossible to predict the success of a viral marketing campaign.

Many other researchers have also written about various aspects of creating a VM campaign.

Barnes et al (Barnes & Mattson 2008) in a longitudinal study of Inc. 500, found a significant

growth in the use of social media and viral marketing technologies. Setty (Setty 2009), a

well-known entrepreneur and blogger in the Silicon Valley, analysed nine viral videos in his

blog to define seven key characteristics that he believes should be included in a viral


message. Wilson (Wilson 2005) further defines six elements of an effective viral marketing

strategy. Dye (Dye 2000) defined the assessment criteria for the buzz-worthiness of

products. The book, The Dragonfly Effect (Aaker & Smith 2010) propose a four winged

framework (see Appendix F, point 1) for social media marketers to get amplification or

infectious action from the customers engaged in social networks.

Dye (Dye 2000) proposed a list of powerful tactics (see Appendix F, point 2) for creating a

viral marketing campaign. Balter (Balter 2005) describes creating a Seeding campaign as one

in which the product is placed among influential consumers so that they can communicate

favourably about it to other consumers. However, managing favourable outcomes in social

media can be tricky as influencers can write positive or negative comments about the

product, so identifying influencers and influencing them should be done very carefully,

ideally based on relevance of the content, influence (traffic) and screened - possible on a

one-to-one basis - before they are chosen to be seeded.

Kozinets et al (Kozinets et al. 2010) defines four important factors (see Appendix F, point 3)

that influence WOM communication. Highlighting the importance of type of narrative

(Evaluation, Explanation, Embracing and Endorsement) in the WOM communication,

Kozinets et al (Kozinets et al. 2010) argue that the type of WOMM promotion, including the

product type, must be considered (see Appendix F, point 4). They further argues that

marketers need to carefully understand the on-going character narrative, communication

forum and the communal norms in the social network(s) where they plan to execute a VM

campaign. They can achieve this by:

Identifying and elaborating on the context, including the product being marketed

and the target market.

Measuring and classifying different types of character narratives and communication

forums.

Understanding and respecting communal norms (explore and classify the norms and

relate to particular outcomes such as reciprocity, trust and role of authority).

Considering the implications associated with commercial-communal tensions.


Larson (Larson 2009) make an interesting point in that it is essential to ensure that there are

other components that support viral marketing campaign and that there is an appeal to the

customer’s emotions. Larson (Larson 2009) also emphasises that the message should be in a

format that is easy to share and that the message arouse a response in the consumer strong

enough to result in the forwarding, or sharing, of that message with their social network

(How to launch a low-cost viral marketing effort 2008).

Linking viral marketing campaigns to the company strategy and capabilities, Larson (Larson

2009) also points out that the companies need to be prepared both internally and externally

in order to positively benefit from consumer interaction. Larson (Larson 2009) also outlines

one of the main challenge is for the marketers to monitor, manage and influence the two-

way communication that results from the application of social media as once the message

reaches the point where it becomes viral, not only the spread cannot be controlled, but the

entire brand message and its interpretation is no longer in the hands of the company.

2.8 Measuring effectiveness of a VM Campaign

Emerging social network analysis and visualisation techniques offer the marketers to delve

deeper into consumer minds (Whitney 2010) – to identify connectors, influencers,

implementers and other types of members in the group. Whitney (Whitney 2010) describes

that social network visualisations can help identify important connecting points such as pre-

established relationships, shared expertise, and who may have information that isn’t

obvious from their current roles. EventGraphs (Hansen, Smith & Shneiderman 2010) can be

used to illustrate the structure of connections and communications among people

discussing an event. These EventGraphs can help identify sub-groups within larger

conversations, as well as individuals with unique social signatures. Jesse Thomas and Brian

Solis (Solis & Thomas 2011), the social media gurus, recently developed an inforgraphic of

the Twitterverse (See Appendix E) depicting important tools to help marketers more

effectively navigate, engage, analyse and measure participation on Twitter.


Many other tools are now emerging that allow marketers to analyse multiple social media

networks (Some examples are PeerIndex.net and PeopleBrowsr.com), but these tools are

still very basic in terms of providing consolidated analytics to the marketers.

The other challenge for marketers is the Sentiment Analysis. Current systems are not good

enough to accurately measures emotions. Companies that currently claim to do this are only

touching the surface as they match words but not relate whether they are meaningful or

not. The variations in the language used i.e. abbreviations, slang, interpretations of words,

local dialects etc. makes it even more difficult to develop systems that can accurately

measure sentiments with respect to brands in online conversations. Marketers still have to

depend on specialised tools to analyse individual social networks and then perform a

manually qualitative analysis to make sense of the cross network data and the use of

sentiments in the online conversation.

2.9 How to make a Viral Marketing campaign sustainable?

There is very little written on whether a VM campaign can be made sustainable. Generally

speaking, viral messages are associated with large spikes where the message takes a certain

amount of time to reach the Tipping Point (Gladwell 2000) and then spreads uncontrollably

and then dies down once the message loses its uniqueness. However, marketers should take

a different approach when it comes to sustainability in product/services related VM

campaigns – one of sustaining the interest of the customers once they have experienced the

product or service on offer. Targeted VM campaigns differ from general viral messages in

that they are designed for the customer to give a taste of the product or service on offer.

Once the marketers have the customers’ attention, they should use the standard product

management and marketing principles to help sustain customer interest – be it engaging

with customers, listening to their feedback and using it to drive improvements, managing

their expectations, developing brand loyalty and delighting them when it comes to providing

customer service.

2.10 Summary


There seems to be a perception that Social Media is a quick and low cost solution to market

products to a targeted audience. Marketers talk about developing viral marketing

campaigns using social media as the key to reach out to a large consumer base in a very

short time span. Researchers have talked about the characteristics of a viral message, its

advantages and disadvantages, however, there seems to a gap between the actual study of

viral messages and how they are, or can be, utilised by the organisations to market their

products. This paper will aim to fill this gap by answering these key research questions:

Is viral marketing of digital products different from viral messages (e.g. YouTube

videos)?

What are the steps an organisation needs to take while considering, designing and

executing a viral marketing campaign using social media?

Once a viral marketing campaign is successful, what should an organisation do to

sustain the customer’s interest?


3. Methodology

This chapter provides an outline of the research methodology used to answer the research

questions - the research approach, a description of primary data collection process for the

interviews, secondary research, data analysis techniques used and limitations of the

adopted research method.

3.1 Research approach

The research approach influences design and provides an opportunity to consider benefits

and limitations of various approaches available to the researcher (Crewell 2003). Two types

of approaches are available – deductive and inductive. Deductive approach tests theories,

while an inductive approach forms theories (Marcoulides 1998). This report uses inductive

research approach as it aims to formulate hypothesis and develop general theory around

how organisations could go about marketing digital products, especially viral marketing,

using social media.

There are two methods available for data analysis – Qualitative and Quantitative.

Qualitative research is “a research strategy that usually emphasises words rather than

quantification in the collection and analysis of data” (Bryman & Bell 2007), while

quantitative research is based on data analysis to generate reliability. Qualitative research

better reflects “the quality of the lived experience of individuals, which cannot be reduced

to numerical values using statistical analysis” (Hewitt-Taylor 2001). Social media is a

dynamic field which is continuously changing. This means that although quantitative analysis

would provide data, designing an appropriate survey to get qualified opinions and

understand the deeper issues in this area was quite challenging (Amaratunga et al. 2002).

This report uses the qualitative method to explore the research questions as it allows

researchers to conduct in-depth explorations of a particular phenomenon (Crewell 2003).


This choice is further justified as the research questions focus on opinions, feelings and

experiences, thus providing subjective data.

3.2 Data collection methods

In-depth interviews act as the primary source of the research and syndicate services

(Twitter, blogs, Facebook groups etc.) as the secondary sources.

Qualitative analysis allows for a better understanding and interpretation of the experiences

of their subjects (Tvede & Ohnemus 2001). This is important for this research as it looks at a

wide variety of experiences, understanding of the subject and interpretation of the data

gathered. In order to achieve this, in-depth personal interviews with market participants

were conducted at prearranged locations. The discussion in the interviews was structured

around the core research questions, but no set questionnaire was developed. The

interviews themselves were semi-structured in that even though the questions were based

on research questions, they were kept open ended and the direction of the discussions was

based on the interviewee's experience and area of expertise.

The reasons for selecting semi-structured interviews as the preferred approach are:

They involve a series of open-ended questions allowing the discussion on research

topics.

They allow the interviewer to encourage the interviewee to consider a question

further.

They provide a high level of response.

Necessary precautions were taken to ensure that there were no faults in recording the

interviews. Interviews were recorded on an audio recording device and then carefully

transcribed to avoid any such issues.

The questions in the interviews were sequenced in the following conceptual order:


Social media strategy and capability assessment

Marketing strategy, especially the importance of an integrated approach

Design attributes for Product / Service for them to be considered for Viral Marketing

Designing a viral marketing message for product/services

Importance of influencers

Executing, managing and monitoring a viral marketing campaign, and the importance

of sentiment analysis

Exploring whether a viral marketing campaign can be made sustainable

Candidates for the interview were selected on the basis of their experience in social media

marketing and their relevance in the managing overall strategy and executing specific parts

of the SMM strategy.

Due to geographical constraints and professional commitments, one of the interviews - with

the Online Community Manager of KIK Interactive Inc. - had to be done as email

conversations. It would have been better to conduct this interview as a telephone

conversation but it wasn’t feasible because of the time differences and other work

commitments on their part. All interviews were conducted in March 2011.

3.3 Interview subjects

Colin Gilchrist – SocialTailor.com: Colin is a social media strategist, who helps

organisations assess their overall marketing strategy and help them integrate social

media marketing as part of this strategy

Andrew Burnett - UrbanNiche: Andrew helps companies design and execute social

media marketing campaigns. Andrew's company specialises in pushing the marketing

message with a view to reach a point where the message could go viral.


Jenny Herbison and Rachel Armitage - Skyscanner: Skyscanner is an online flight

search company that has recently launched a very successful mobile phone

application. Rachel and Jenny, together, are responsible for the overall marketing

strategy for all geographical markets Skyscanner operates in.

Tera Dargavel – KIK Interactive, Inc.: KIK Interactive, Inc. provides a mobile

application that allows cross platform real time texts on mobile devices. KIK was

downloaded on 1 million devices within first 15 days of its launch. Tera works as the

Online Community Manager at KIK.

3.4 Secondary sources

The rapid changes in the field of social media mean that there is a scarcity of academic

literature in this area. Hence, a lot of research was focused on works by opinion leaders and

practitioners in the field of social media marketing. In order to get an appropriate range of

secondary resources, wide reading was done including these sources:

Analysts reports

Industry and academic journals

Blogs

Twitter

Facebook groups

White papers

Twitter turned out to be one of the most useful resources for secondary research as it

seems to have become a platform where all the latest ideas are shared in real time, based

on the experiences of the companies and the thought leaders involved in this area.


3.5 Data analysis

The data processing in this report is based on the technique described by Kumar et al

(Kumar, Tan & Steinbach 2005). Once the interviews had been conducted and the

transcripts had been prepared, the usable material, by themes, was drawn out from the

transcripts through a process called Coding. The coded research material was copied and

pasted into separate Microsoft Word files, one for each theme. These files provided an easy

look through while writing the Empirical Materials chapter. The qualitative data was then

analysed using the interpretive approach (Miles & Huberman 1994).

The material collected through qualitative methods is invariably unstructured and unwieldy

(Bryman & Bell 2007). It is the rough material collected from the field, if the form of

videotapes, conversations etc., that form the basis of analysis (Bogdan & Biklen 1992). Due

to its complicated nature, there is no standardised approach to the analysis of the

qualitative data (Saunders, Lewis & Thornhill 1998).

The raw material resulting from the data gathering process in qualitative research is usually

in the form of words, and there are different strategies to deal with words. Miles et al (Miles

& Huberman 1994) outlined three approaches for analysing qualitative data – interpretive,

collaborative social research, and social anthropology. Creswell (Crewell 2003) further

identified five approaches – case study, biography, phenomenology, grounded theory, and

ethnography.

This report uses the interpretive approach to analyse the data as it is used to present a

holistic view of data rather than a condensed view. The results of this analysis are discussed

in the Analysis chapter.

3.6 Research limitations

The exploratory nature of the research and the majority of experienced practitioners living

in distant locations - most successful social media marketing firms are either based in

expertise were limited. However, much consideration was given in selecting the suitable


interviewees mainly via professional recommendations in the social media industry and a

review of their work. Even though care was taken while identifying the right interviewees,

the number of interviews meant that the findings of the research are not tested to be

statistically significant. Further to this, mitigating any kind of bias that interviewees might

have had, as argued by Robson (Robson 1993), is limited by my understating of the subject

area and interpretation.

3.7 Ethical considerations

The interviewees have been informed of the academic purpose of this study. They have

granted permission for using their details in the report. The research is based on analysing

primary and secondary data using frameworks already developed by researchers. A soft

copy of the completed report will be made available to the interviewees. This research also

has approval from University of Edinburgh and gives rise to no ethical issues.


4. Empirical Material

In literature review section, we presented the theory behind various aspects of viral

marketing and how businesses should go about creating a strategy, a plan, executing the

plan and monitoring the campaigns. In this section, we will present the research data from

the interviews conducted with industry specialists and practitioners.

4.1 Importance of strategy

The interviewees were asked about the importance of an overall marketing strategy for

companies while considering social media marketing or viral marketing as a tool to market

their products and services.

Gilchrist (Gilchrist 2011) of SocialTailor.com emphasised on the importance of employee

buy in and the need to have a crisis management strategy for the companies - before even

considering social media strategies – to make sure they are protected if things go wrong.

One of the first things that I look at is when they are developing their

strategy, they need to analyse and assess the employees throughout

the business.

One of the other things for big corporations is that they need to know

that there brand is protected, so what we need to put in place is crisis

management - the bottom line is that you are listing all the potential

things that could go wrong and are likely to go wrong.

Viral marketing strategy should be integrated in overall marketing strategy and the content

strategy, and that the organisations should clearly define goals, responsibilities and set out a

communication strategy (Gilchrist 2011).

In terms of the strategy, you need to look at content strategy, in fact

there are lots of different elements you need to look at, but you need


to figure out who is doing what? What is that you want to achieve – is

it just more sales or is brand awareness, who is going to deliver it,

etc.?

Herbison et al (Herbison & Armitage 2011) of Skyscanner also alluded to the fact that the

social media marketing needs to be integrated with the overall marketing strategy, and it is

important that same people manage all the channels in a particular market.

Managing these contacts throughout the organisation is key whether

it’s through SEO, through PR or anything else. When do an app, we

make sure there is an integrated view of all the contacts.

The same people managing it is important as well. We have country

specialists that look after PR, SEO and all promotions ensuring that

they can see the opportunities across channels.

Herbison et al (Herbison & Armitage 2011) also described how they used an integrated

approach while launching their mobile phone application:

For each market we have main networks and local networks that are

tried and tested, but for the mobile app we used different people as

it’s the different audience and you cannot go with the same people.

It’s a different product, so we have to treat it differently. Everyone in

the company was very proactive in pitching the mobile app. It wasn’t

just the specific people, but everyone in the company.

Herbison et al (Herbison & Armitage 2011) described the inclusion of operations

department to highlight importance of an overall business strategy, and also to emphasise

the importance of capacity/capability management while executing viral marketing

campaigns:

When we were launching the app, a lot of planning went into that as

to what was the right time to launch it and making sure we had

additional capacity


That’s managed by our operations department. They have

contingency of managing if we suddenly have a surge in traffic. We

have it all planned out and we have capacity to manage say 30% more

traffic to deal sudden surge

If we have knowledge beforehand and expecting a spike we can warn

operations to expect a spike.

Burnett (Burnett 2011) of Urban Niche emphasised this point and argued that the messages

are spread through “every network imaginable”. Dargavel (Dargavel 2011) of KIK Interactive,

Inc. indirectly made a similar point:

Viral marketing is a large effort too - the medium must be decided on,

the marketing story and how it is going to be presented and then the

distribution efforts.

The story and messaging has to make sense and align with the brand -

because people nowadays are much more savvy about marketing and

can see right through blatant, selfish efforts to get as many eyes on

the company name and message as possible.

4.2 Important factors for viral messages

Interviewees were asked to describe factors that would help create a viral message for the

product or service.

Burnett (Burnett 2011) argued that the emotional trigger is crucial for anything to go viral.

He also argues that the product or service being marketed has to be exceptionally good – so

good that people would not be afraid to put their name behind it while promoting it.


You need an emotional trigger for anything to go viral. Most people

think of viral as being funny, but it doesn’t need to be funny at all. It

could be something that’s informative, or something that’s tragic.

It’s all endorsement and if I am going to endorse something in my

name, it needs to be bloody good – it cannot be OK or mediocre.

If you want a spike at the launch, then you really need to find

individuals with clout (with a ‘c’), even involve them in the process of

creating it. Understand the socials sharing mechanics of what we are

creating. Understand the viral mechanisms that we can include within

the product/services that we are creating.

Dargavel (Dargavel 2011) made a similar point with respect to an emotional trigger. :

Often, the medium is a video and the content involves something that

makes people feel sympathy (or empathy), or is something humorous,

or is something extraordinary to witness.

Burnett (Burnett 2011) also emphasised the importance of making the product social

friendly by using Viber – a mobile phone application – as an example:

The guys at Viber have been really clever in the way they have

designed the app. You can automatically access your phone book

through Viber and the app looks through that to see who else is using

Viber.

It just becomes really easy for users to spread the word. It’s cheap, its

user friendly and it makes it really easy for me to contact others to ask

them to use it as well.

Burnett (Burnett 2011) further highlighted that making the products available for free (and

generating revenue by displaying advertisements) further makes the customers buying

decision really easy:


To an extent it’s the freemium model. Do I want my choice of free

music anytime of the day and night? Yes, of course I do.

Dargavel (Dargavel 2011) also agreed with the ease of availability and sharing:

Making it very easy to share the content with friends (i.e., do not put

it behind a pay wall! It will never go viral)

Gilchrist (Gilchrist 2011) believed in experimenting with different concepts for a brand and

testing them in the market to see what people might like and on which platform:

Having chatted to a CEO of a media company, what he does is that he

creates lots and lots of small case studies with the clients brand to see

what works and on what platform, and if one particular thing works

then he would pour lots of money into it to do it properly.

Herbison et al (Herbison & Armitage 2011) also argue about the importance of having a

good product that people like and emphasised on really understanding the market, the

channels that work best in each market and finding the right influencers in each of those

markets and channels within each market.

I think as much as anything, your product has to be strong and when

you give a good product to these people, they will give you a good

review and that’s key.

We have done a number of different things in different markets.

Within each of our managed markets we have identified places where

we need to be to get our app reviewed.

4.3 Importance of influencers


On the question of the importance of influencers in spreading the message about the

product, all interviewees were unanimous in the importance of finding the right

influencers in making a viral marketing campaign a success.

Herbison et al (Herbison & Armitage 2011) describe how they could see the spikes in

downloads when the applications were reviewed and given a good rating. They also

compared downloads to the markets where they were delayed in getting reviews and saw a

positive correlation:

The best example of doing that was that on the review sites, we were

very lucky that we had good contacts of journalists and bloggers and

we just sent them the information, they reviewed the app for us and

then there are people who trust these reviews and see them as

authorities for that, and that’s when you can see the downloads

spikes when they have reviewed the app and given it five stars.

In a couple of our markets, we were a bit delayed compared to others

in terms of doing that, but you can quite accurately see the point at

which we exerted those efforts versus the downloads.

Herbison et al (Herbison & Armitage 2011) reiterated the importance of an integrated

approach in that different approaches worked in different markets, and the channel where

the influencers came from differed between markets.

It’s different for different markets. We make best use of tools where

they make sense and we certainly do manage SEO’s and making sure

who is linking to us and how those links are being passed on. There

are a couple of tools that we started using that are particularly helpful

for tracking relationships.

Gilchrist (Gilchrist 2011) also agreed with the idea that influencers can be found on various

networks or channels, and highlighted the importance of doing research to find out the

right people in the particular sector where product is going to be launched.


There are lots and lots of different ways. For example, AllTop.com

which is an aggregate news websites, advanced blog search through

blogsearch.google.com.

Finding blogs that are opinionated but will also talk about your

product is important. They cannot always be bought, it depends on

the ethics on them, but if they can be bought it’s probably not good

for you the companies.

Burnett (Burnett 2011) agreed with the idea of influencers and their importance, but

offered his specific insight into who the real influencers are i.e. it’s not just a matter of how

many people follow you, but the compound effect of a network of people who will endorse

your message because they trust your judgment, and are influential enough to further push

the message in their network – to the point that the message reaches a critical mass where

it can become truly viral, where no further pushing is required.

There are definitely people who influence things, but it still have to

have genuine content on it. In the social web, the main currency is

endorsement.

There are people who you trust, so you endorse their things and then

there is a reciprocal nature to it that people who trust you will

endorse your things, but it has to be a two way exchange. It then

comes back to the fact that if something is genuinely worth talking

about, it reaches a certain critical mass and then it takes off by itself –

and that’s what an actual viral is.

It’s a relatively tight knit community – there are probably a couple of

hundred people that are really any good, maybe 500 but no more

than that – and this is global. These are your influencers / endorsers

who are not celebrities. So, if Stephen Fry retweets you, of course it is

going to big because he is got millions of followers on Twitter, but the

people who have got 2000 followers can pull a lot of right strings in


the background. Of those people there are around 500 max. Basically,

you all work together, not in a financial sense at all, but there are

favours you trade.

Burnett (Burnett 2011) also explained that submission of product to review websites or

blogs works as well:

These blogs will create content about your product. These blogs then

reach out to power users on various networks because they want

readership and they say, “Have you seen this story?” And then the

whole thing starts getting attention. All the links from the blogs get

shared on these networks and you also get secondary benefits of SEO

from it. And people then talking about it gets converted into

downloads.

When asked about how to know when something has reached this critical mass, Burnett’s

(Burnett 2011) view was that it is usually very intuitive. Dargavel (Dargavel 2011) also

highlighted the importance of online influential space like blogs and review websites:

In the app space you may really hope that your news (press releases,

blog posts) gets picked up by Hacker News because it's one of the

most widely read news sources for Silicon Valley and the tech

industry. You may try to distribute your content to journalists at

various publications (Huffington Post, Tech Crunch, etc.) or you may

just submit it to Reddit or other link collecting sites like that. Again,

there is no tried and true method to viral marketing but there are best

practices.

4.4 Executing a campaign


Once a marketing campaign is launched, marketers need to be able to monitor its

progress, engage with the customers, manage their feedback and measure the success of

the campaign. Interviewees were asked how they managed this.

All interviewees depended on a variety of tools to carry out the monitoring tasks.

Burnett (Burnett 2011) used Raven (to manage SEO at the domain level), Trak.ly (to track

individual URL), PostRank (for new launches) and Google Analytics (for general traffic

information)

Gilchrist (Gilchrist 2011) preferred using a company called Forth Matrix as they combine all

the information together, instead of using separate tools.

Dargavel (Dargavel 2011) highlighted that there are free tools on the web that can be used

to, “listen to the whole of the web or parts of it”.

Herbison et al (Herbison & Armitage 2011) described that their company uses a variety of

tools:

For SEO we are currently using a mixture of Raven, Linkdex, SEOMoz.

We also use Basecamp for project planning and tracking. In terms of

analytics we are big fans of Google Analytics and the various other

tools Google provides (Webmaster, Adplanner etc.) and usually find

that their free offering fulfills our needs. That said, for the mobile

app, we use Flurry which specifically tracks mobile sessions

Customer engagement among the interviewees happen through responding to customer

queries through emails, responding to comments on blogs, or on Twitter. They agreed that

specific processes and communication strategies should be developed in the organisations

to manage customer feedback. Only one out of four interviewees talked about proactively

monitoring the online space for sentiment analysis or netnography concepts in order to

figure what people are talking about their brands in the social web. Herbison et al

(Herbison & Armitage 2011) describe the situation at Skyscanner as:


We have people who email us and every email gets a response, so we

do track our reputation online, but we are taking that one step

forward looking at emotions online. We are not there yet.

Herbison (Herbison & Armitage 2011) further pointed out the importance of doing the

sentiment analysis correctly and allocating enough resource to it:

In my previous experience I worked with clients managing their

reputation and looking at negative emotions, but it’s all very well

knowing them but unless you can action on it, it’s useless. We were

giving all this information to our clients, but they couldn’t action any

of it because they didn’t have the resource.

There are very few organisations that have the time and resource to

engage properly. Also, one thing you do not want to do is to engage

incorrectly because you will end up doing more harm. If you are

dipping in and out, it is unsatisfactory to the user base

Dargavel (Dargavel 2011) also highlighted the importance of dedicated

resource for customer engagement:

A brand, or even a company representative, is much more able to

answer questions or concerns in blog comments or by responding to

tweets. Negative conversations are usually mediated by explanation.

4.5 Sustainability of a VM campaign

Interviewees were asked if they thought a viral marketing campaign be made sustainable

over a long period

The interviewees thought that it was very hard, if not impossible, to do so. It was felt that a

possible outcome was to increase the average traffic over a period of time following the


viral marketing campaign if the product and/or the viral message was very good. Burnett

(Burnett 2011) pointed out that:

Either you consistently create engaging content that’s going to get

spike after spike after spike, or you should look at it in a way that

when you create a spike you increase the average traffic towards the

product/service or the website. So, the plateau after the spike should

be higher than the one before if you have done it cleverly. If you have

not done it cleverly the plateau will be the same and if you have done

it stupidly the average will actually be lower.

Gilchrist (Gilchrist 2011) was of the similar view:

Once it has spiked it’s great, but then let’s have a steady growth, and

then another peak and then another peak. Trying to sustain the spike

is very very difficult. This is because what you are doing is you are

shocking people to get them interested. To constantly shock people,

the campaign has to be so entertaining that everyone is going to love

it, but you will never be able to make everyone happy and sustain it.

It’s very very unusual.

Burnett (Burnett 2011) further stressed that designing the product with social sharing

mechanics in mind and engaging influencers at any early stage of the product design will

increase the chances of a product going viral:

Understand the socials sharing mechanics of what we are creating.

Understand the viral mechanisms that we can include within the

product/services that we are creating.

You can also build in mechanisms to share things online within the

product. It is important to note that the earlier you engage the

influencers, the better. Once you have already done it, there isn’t

much influencers can do to help design the product/service.


Dargavel (Dargavel 2011) thought it may be possible to sustain a viral

campaign, but warned about the fine balance between reiteration of a theme

and an overkill:

Take a look at Old Spice - I think they're trying to make their viral

marketing campaign a little more long lasting. So, when you have a

good idea you can stick with it and reiterate - but there is a fine line

between a theme and overkill.


5. Analysis

My interest in social media started as a quest for more information. The new applications on

the mobile devices (for example, Flipboard on iPad) have made it much easier to identify,

target and receive information from the specific sources that are of interest to me. Twitter

has increasingly become an important online source for the latest information in almost any

area –including but not limited to news, ideas, opinions and reflections.

In November 2010, I came across a tweet about a product called KIK - a cross platform

instant messaging application. It caught my interest as I had seen Blackberry users raving

about the Blackberry Messenger (BBM). A simple search for #KIK on Twitter revealed that

thousands of people were talking about this product, downloading it and giving positive or

negative feedback about it. Two weeks after launching, KIK was downloaded on more than 1

million mobile devices. Achieving such a huge number of downloads in such a short span of

time caught my interest.

A few questions sprung to mind straight away. How did they manage to do it? Was it just

luck or a carefully carved strategy? Are the marketers aware of the ongoing conversation on

the social networks about their brand, and if so, how do they manage it? Then the

conversation on Twitter slowed down considerably, and the question I asked myself was

what could marketers do to sustain the consumer interest in their brand?

In December 2010, I came across another app, Viber, a competitor to Skype, providing free

calls between iPhones over a 3G network. It was a similar story with Viber in that it achieved

1 million download in just 5 days. KIK now didn’t seem like a one off app that got lucky.

I started looking for already existing research on these topics. It was surprising when I found

that most of the academic material was quite dated, more so because social media and its

usage is changing so rapidly at the moment that it is difficult for the academic world to catch

up.

I also realised that Twitter was one of the main sources for finding information. Most

opinions leaders, industry specialists and even industry and academic journals tweet about


their papers, blog entries, comments on other members’ articles and ideas. However,

Twitter is like a stream of consciousness, with ideas and thoughts flowing vertically on a 19

inch screen - just like credits flowing on the screen at the end of a movie, but only much

faster. This stream of data is on a variety of subjects and comes from hundreds of people

you follow on Twitter. Once I managed to get a handle on the conversations that were

specific to social media marketing, I started reading blogs, industry and academic journals

and whitepapers to understand how companies go about using social media as an effective

marketing tool.

This gave me deep insights into: how organisations go about using social media, latest

development and opinions from the thought leaders in social media, reviews and opinions

on various strategies and tools used in social media marketing, and importance of sentiment

analysis, or Netnography (Kozinets 2010) of the consumer conversation about a certain

brand. This secondary research also allowed me to get an understanding of the key areas

surrounding viral marketing of the products. It helped me develop a framework for the

interviews. Twitter also helped me identify some of the key social media influencers and

converse with them. For example, connection with the Online Community Manager of KIK

was established using Twitter, and after a few tweets back and forth she agreed to

participate in my research.

Below is an analysis of the primary and secondary research.

5.1 Viral Marketing

Viral marketing literature seems to be divided into two types of viral campaigns: campaigns

that go viral just because they appeal to human emotions – the one’s that do not necessary

have a viral marketing strategy behind them. For example, YouTube videos that catch

people attention and go viral over a certain period. The second one is the strategic viral

marketing campaigns around a product or a service, a brand or even just a message. These

campaigns are well thought out and planned. More often than not, people seem to use

these interchangeably when talking about viral campaigns. In the interviews, the companies


that didn’t have their own products seemed to have a broad focus on viral messages

(Gilchrist 2011), while product companies were more focused on the properties that were

more suitable to making their own products go viral (Dargavel 2011) (Herbison & Armitage

2011). Since the focus of this paper is on digital products, it mainly covers the marketing

campaigns that are carefully planned for digital products to viral. This means that the

conclusion may differ from designing viral campaigns if the focus was mainly raising the

awareness of the brand.

5.2 Strategy

Before we look at the specifics of a viral marketing campaign, it is important to understand

the overall context in which a company would want to use viral marketing. The research

shows most companies have an overall marketing strategy, and if viral marketing is part of

that strategy, then it needs to have defined goals, resource with assigned responsibilities,

and a plan of action (Gilchrist 2011) (Dargavel 2011) (Herbison & Armitage 2011).

There seem to be enough examples of viral marketing campaigns getting negative publicity

for the company – for example, Groupon’s superbowl advertisement or Threshers discount

coupons (Andrew 2011). The un-predictive and unmanageable nature of viral messages can

be dangerous for the companies. Watts et al (Watts, Peretti & Frumin 2007) talk about

combining viral marketing and mass media marketing, in what they call Big Seed Marketing,

to achieve maximum reach and to counter the unpredictable nature of the viral marketing

campaigns. The research also highlights the importance of having a crisis strategy in case

things do go wrong.

The companies need to understand the markets they operate in and the marketing channels

that are most effective in each of these markets. A marketing strategy should then be

defined, as part of an overall business strategy, covering the marketing techniques for each

combination of market and market channel (Herbison & Armitage 2011). Whether viral

marketing is part of this strategy or not should be decided on the merits of each channel

within the market(s) the company operates in. For example, Twitter seems to provide an


easy platform for ideas to go viral, by using the hashtag facility. Every day, there are

trending topics that are referenced using these hashtags on Twitter. These trends are in a

way similar to viral messages in that they spread when users use those words in their

tweets. There has to be a trigger for the users to do that. In a way this is similar to the

emotional triggers that were mentioned in the interviews. However, Twitter, as a marketing

channel, may only be relevant for certain markets and the marketers should be aware of

that.

5.3 Capabilities

The research shows that while defining the marketing strategy, the companies’ capabilities

needs to be assessed (Gilchrist 2011). One would expect this to be common sense, but it

seems that it is often overlooked especially when it comes to social media marketing. There

is growing literature that supports the need of an Online Community Manager in the

companies to manage all aspects of social media. The interviewees in the primary research

were unanimous in their opinion that companies need to assign specific people and have

clear responsibilities when it comes to social media marketing (Herbison & Armitage 2011)

(Gilchrist 2011) (Dargavel 2011). These responsibilities can range from delivering marketing

messages, monitoring and managing the overall community and marketing campaigns,

engaging with customers, and listening and responding to customer feedback. Viral

marketing, by its very nature, makes this even harder as the sheer number of customers

engaging with the company could increase exponentially.

Having appropriate system capabilities within the company was also highlighted in the

interviews, especially when companies are looking to use viral marketing as the tool to

market their digital products (Herbison & Armitage 2011). In the case of KIK, Viber and

Skyscanner, hundreds of thousands of download requests could hit the servers in a matter

of hours. Companies need to build a strategy around this exponential increase in traffic

when considering the viral marketing route. Failure to deal with this could result in

potentially irrecoverable damage to the brand.


This exponential increased traffic could also mean a similar increase in customers trying to

engage with the company. The companies need to decide how to tackle this increase in

customer engagement.

5.4 Product

Interviewees felt that emotional connection with the receiver is one most important

variable in the spread of a viral message (Gilchrist 2011) (Burnett 2011) (Setty 2009). The

other is the ease with which the receiver can pass it on to their network (Burnett 2011).

Online viral messages, like videos, that appeal to the viewers can be easily shared over

internet through blogs, websites and social networks.

The research shows that digital products are slightly different. The product themselves have

to be brilliant at what they are meant to do in addition to the promotions around them.

They should also possess characteristics that allow the user of the products to spread the

message easily (Burnett 2011) (Setty 2009). Viber’s ability to invite other users from within

the product and easy connections to the social networks help customers share their

experiences very easily.

Price is another characteristic. It seems to be the case the offering a free product for the

customers to try the basic functionality, and a paid version for the premium functionality

could lure a lot more customers to start with (Burnett 2011). On the other hand, a really

good product can demand a premium price and people will still buy it. They key difference

here is usually in the speed of adoption. Free digital products seem to get a wider spread

more quickly while the paid products may reach the similar amount of downloads, but it

takes a lot more time to get there.

5.5 Influencers


Knowing the key influencers in each market and each channel within the market is key to

any marketing campaign. According to the research, viral marketing of the digital products

seems to be no different. Getting the right package to the influencer is important as well i.e.

understand what motivates each influencer and provide them with what they are looking

for. For example, in some case monetary rewards may be frowned upon. Influencers write

about products as they are passionate about them rather than seeking money. In a typical

Product Diffusion Curve (Godin 2005) they want to be seen as the Innovators or the very

early adopters who influence the majority of people – that’s what gets them going. So,

many a times an exclusive preview of the product might do more wonders than a monetary

reward.

What seems to make viral marketing different, according to the research, is the concerted

effort by the key influencers in the online space, to push the product and the marketing

message to a critical point where no further market push is required and the customers

themselves become the product evangelists who then promote the products within their

own networks (Burnett 2011).

5.6 Creating a campaign

Traditional viral campaigns contain highly creative and unique content with emotional

impact (Setty 2009). The secondary research seems to suggest that all viral marketing

campaigns need this kind of content. However, the interviewees had different point of

views. The interviewees from companies that had digital products seem to suggest that a

good product promoted in traditional ways using highly influential people in the right

channels in the right markets are the best way to go about marketing the product and

building momentum (Herbison & Armitage 2011). However, the interviewees who came

from a consulting or a strategic point of view were divided in their opinion in that one of

them stressed on the importance of creativity of the promotional message around the

product and the other about the importance of both creativity combined with a brilliant

product.


Further to this, everyone seemed to agree on the fact that the consumers today are very

clever when it comes to identifying whether a campaign is genuine or just a selfish effort to

get the company noticed. So, the marketing efforts have to be very high-quality and ensure

that the receiver gets a genuine benefit from the content.

In my opinion, the fantastic product is absolutely crucial to any viral marketing campaign for

digital products, unless the company is aiming to create a one hit wonder, in which case the

product itself is irrelevant. Ideally the product needs to be designed for social spread with

ideas from influencers – to get an early buy-in. Designing a creative promotional message

that would have a viral appeal in addition to a good product should increase the chances for

a product going viral. However, creating a message that is genuine and makes sense - one

that aligns with the brand, identifying the right influencers in the right markets,

understanding what motivates them and engaging with them accordingly, and a high quality

joined up effort from people within companies is far more important.

5.7 Campaign management

The three main areas that the research points out as important in terms of campaign

execution are Seeding, Monitoring and Managing.

Seeding is about influencing the influencer i.e. making sure enough key influencers in the

target markets like the product and they are ready to promote it in their channels, hopefully

to the extent that the message gathers enough momentum to reach the Tipping Point.

The interviewees seemed to agree on the role of the influencers, but backed different

approaches when it came to building momentum. One of the approach discussed was to

submit the products to influential websites then hope that enough users will read and share

the message. Another approach was to build on top of the previous approach and create an

integrated marketing campaign, perhaps using mass media campaigns to get maximum

exposure (Gilchrist 2011). Finally, one interviewee talked about identifying influencers with

worldwide network of other influencers covering all online channels, and leveraging that

network to build momentum (Burnett 2011).


I believe that companies need to look at all the options available to them. All approaches

identified in the primary and secondary research seemed logical. A particular approach that

a company adopts would perhaps depend on the combination of the following factors -

product type, the specific markets for the product, the channels where the key influencers

are and whether they have personal network of other influencers in the relevant market,

and the financial resources available to the marketing team – e.g. mass media marketing is

much more costly that social media marketing.

Once the campaign is launched, the interviewees believed that channels in each market

need to be monitored for the spread of the message (Herbison & Armitage 2011). This is

done using a variety of free or paid tools for each channel within each market. For example,

Google Analytics could be used to monitor the number of clicks to a website, but a

completely different tool was used to measure the number of users a tweet would reach, or

how many retweets did the message get on Twitter.

The research suggests that conversations on the relevant channels also need to be

monitored for positive or negative feedback. Reward positive feedback, if possible, even if it

is with a simple acknowledgement - it will buy customer loyalty. Monitoring the network for

any negative feedback and managing customers perception when it happens was also

highlighted as crucial, especially the rogue elements, for instance competitors, trying to

spread negative feedback (Gilchrist 2011). One of the interviewee suggested that companies

should have crisis management strategy in place to be able to deal with such things

effectively (Gilchrist 2011). However, all interviewees felt that this can be very resource

hungry task and most companies only really engage in a selection of channels with the

customers (Dargavel 2011) (Herbison & Armitage 2011).

The research also shows that the measurements of sentiments – Netnography (Kozinets

2010) - in the online networks is quite a complex and tricky subject, and the tools available

to do this kind of analysis are far from perfect (Herbison & Armitage 2011). These tools

involve scraping relevant data from the conversations customers have on online channels.

The analysis of this data is still quite primitive in that it cannot deal with the variation in

dialects, cultural variations in meaning of words, language variations, and slang to name a

few. This means a lot of this analysis requires manual manipulation of data which is very


time consuming and expensive. Hence, the companies use netnographic analysis for very

simple things like brand mentions.

In terms of measuring the Return on Investment the interviewees felt that it is quite a

simple process for digital products as you can measure the number of downloads and

compare it with message spread, and the cost of running the campaign (Dargavel 2011).

Having a Plan B, in case the seeding fails, was seen as quite important campaign

management tool. This could be another set of seeds or a different spin on the product or

perhaps a mass media marketing campaign.

5.8 Sustainability

Every company’s dream is a sustained high growth of their products. Since viral marketing

could potentially provide a means of sustaining exponential growth over a long period of

time, it is quite a lucrative concept. Even though the interviewees thought sustaining the

level of growth that come from a successful viral marketing campaign is theoretically

possible, say by repeating brilliance time and time again (Gilchrist 2011), being able to this

practically was very hard (Burnett 2011) (Gilchrist 2011). The research seems to tilt in favour

of creating campaigns to increase the average growth over a longer period instead.

5.9 Summary

As social media and social networking is such a new concept, companies are finding it quite

hard to come to terms with the fact that it is more than just something social, that social

networks are valuable places where customers interact with each other and communicate

their opinions about brands. These online social networks are extensions of real world social

networks (Dye 2000). In the real world influencers used to, and still, play an important role

in spreading word about a product (Kozinets et al. 2010). They put their reputation on the

line when they do so and hence they have to make sure that products are of top quality.


Such is the case with online product marketing, the only difference being the influencers can

now be found writing blogs, freelance articles, reviewing products, tweeting their opinions

etc.

Just like strategy is important in creating word-of-mouth campaigns in the real world, it is

also important in social media space. As companies become aware of the importance of the

social media, the impact it can have on company’s brand, and the opportunity it provides,

they are slowly beginning to include social media as part of their overall business and

marketing strategy.

Marketers need to consider viral marketing on social media like any another marketing

channel. They also need to develop integrated marketing strategy in order to decide how

best to make use of mass media marketing and social media marketing to have the

maximum predictable reach (Watts, Peretti & Frumin 2007).

Due to the nature of viral marketing on social media i.e. the potential of rapidly attracting

millions of customers without limited geographical boundaries, companies need to closely

consider their capabilities.

Viral messages by their nature are very hard to control when they go truly viral. Marketers

need to be prepared for both positive and negative feedback on the product – making sure

there are enough people in the company, with clearly defined roles and responsibilities,

who are ready to deal with both positive and negative feedback from a viral marketing

campaign. As much as the positive feedback could potentially put the company on the path

of exponential growth, the negative feedback on a viral campaign has the potential to

damage a company’s reputation irrevocably. Companies need to have a crisis management

strategy in place in case something does go wrong.

Companies also need to make sure their systems are capable of dealing with the sudden

increase in traffic to their servers if a viral marketing campaign does become successful.

The quality of product itself has to be exceptional when planning to include viral marketing

campaign as part of the overall marketing campaign. Viral messages are usually spread by

influencers, and influencers usually would not put their reputation on line within their


communities if the product is not something their followers would like. Influencers generally

demand the product to be exceptional, whether it is the quality of the idea or the product

itself.

It is of course feasible to try and create a viral marketing campaign using an average product

with an exceptionally creative and dynamic message around it, but these campaigns have

very short shelf life. More often than not, these products risk damaging influencers’

reputation or even if the customers try these products out they will not recommend them

further to their networks (Burnett 2011). Instead they might just be interested in the

creative aspect of the message – which could be a funny video for instance - rather than the

product itself.

However, a fantastic product, wrapped in a unique, dynamic and creative message, seeded

to influencers in the right forums - using character narratives that are appealing to the users

of these forums, and following the communal norms (Kozinets et al. 2010) - could

compound the chances of the marketing campaign going viral.

Marketers should also try and involve key influencers during the design phase of the

product. The earlier the influencers are involved the more robust the case for the marketers

to get a buy-in from the influencers to promote the product. Making the influencers feel

they are responsible for the product design will help them push the product harder within

their communities.

Product should also be designed for social spread i.e. the design should consider making it

very easy for the user or the customer to spread the word about the product within their

social networks. This ease of sharing will allow the customer to promote the product and

help increase the viral spread to farthest nodes within the networks. Hotmail and Viber are

two great examples of this. Providing a cut down version of the product for free would also

help with the social spread.

In terms of finding the right influencers to seed, marketers need to understand who the key

influencers are within each channels i.e. influential bloggers, product reviewers, opinion

leaders or generally influential people in a particular area. Having large number of followers,


as in the case of celebrities, does not necessarily make someone the right influencer to

target. Marketers could mine the social networks to find the key influencers and influential

subgroups within various networks, but usually experienced marketers know these

influencers within their markets. If this is not the case, then approaching influential social

media consultants could be a good place to start.

Once the key influencers have been identified, marketers need to understand what makes

the influencer tick. Influencers may not be motivated by money. In fact, offering money to

promote the product could have detrimental effects, especially if their followers find out

and do not approve of it. It could be as simple as submitting product for a review to a very

influential website and the influencer raving about the product because of its superior idea

and quality.

Marketers can also engage with professional influencers, who have a global network of

other influencers on a variety of marketing channels. These influencers work on the

currency of favours with each other, and share each other’s messages with their network

(Burnett 2011). They do not necessarily have millions of followers, but have followers who

would in turn have a large number of trusted followers on the node below – thus pushing

the marketing message to a wide network in an attempt to build momentum. The ultimate

idea is to build enough momentum by pushing the message so that it reaches a point when

it becomes self-propagating i.e. it becomes viral.

Once the campaign has been launched, marketers need to monitor and manage the

campaign. They need to be able to measure the spread of the campaign, monitor the

conversation about their brand on the social networks, monitor the customer feedback on

the product and manage appropriate responses to the feedback. Marketers need to act as

product evangelists and proactively engage with the customers about the features and

benefits of the product. All these tasks require a variety of tools to be available to the

marketers. Both free and paid versions of tools are available in the market. Marketers

should try different tools and settle for the ones that suit them best in terms of usability,

quality of results and subscription fees.


Marketers also need to make sure enough human resource is allocated for monitoring and

managing the viral marketing campaign. The resource requirement could potentially be

huge if a company were to engage effectively with all customer feedback. A sensible

approach would be to select some of the major channels and focus efforts on those.

One of the challenges in monitoring campaigns like these is to get an accurate idea of the

sentiments in the social networks. People use many different languages, dialects, slang,

abbreviations and cultural contexts when conversing on social networks, and it is very

difficult to get an accurate measure of the sentiment using the tools currently available in

the market. There is almost certainly a lot of manual work required to go through the

collected data and assess whether the sentiment analysis provided by the automated tools

is correct. If the available resource is a concern, marketers could just focus on a smaller area

of sentiment measurement, for example, only go through conversations from particular

channels that mention their brand name.

It is every marketers dream to have a sustainable growth over a long period as a result of a

marketing campaign. Viral marketing campaigns usually see a quick spike and then flatten

out in a very short time span. One of the things marketers could aim for is to get a higher

average user base after the spike generated by a successful viral marketing campaign. This

higher average can be sustained if marketers follow product lifecycle management and

customer service management best practices.

Theoretically speaking, in order to be able to sustain the spike from a viral marketing

campaign over a long period, the message has to be so creative that the receiver never gets

tired of spreading it. It could also be sustained by creating brilliant campaigns one after

another. These results are very hard to achieve repeatedly. However, if we apply these ideas

to a viral marketing campaign for digital products, a product designed to encourage the user

to very easily spread the message on their social networks may be equivalent to a message

that receiver never gets tired of spreading. Again, Hotmail and Viber can be used as good

examples here. This compounded with a brilliant product might just mean that the viral

nature of the campaign can be sustained until every node in the network has been touched.


However, when marketers get excited about viral marketing, do they really mean viral in

terms of getting to a point where the message becomes uncontrollable? This sounds like a

highly undesirable situation for the marketers to find themselves in, especially if something

goes wrong. Maybe viral messages are more suitable for brand awareness, perhaps once

the product has been successfully marketed in a large enough, but yet controlled,

environment? It sounds more likely that marketers would want to be able to manage

customer expectations, especially in the early phases of product launch when the product

and its benefits are yet to be proven – perhaps by using a network of influencers to spread

the word. However, even in a controlled environment, marketers need to be aware of the

dangers of the viral spread when the message seems to be reaching a critical point as it will

be very hard to manage expectations after a certain level of spread.


6. Conclusion

This chapter contains the summary of the results described in Chapter 5 with particular

reference to the research questions. It also contains my personal reflections on the research

and the process of getting to the results. Furthermore, contributions of this research to

existing literature, lessons for the business are discussed before highlighting the future

research opportunities.

6.1 Summary of results

Question 1: Is viral marketing of digital products different from viral messages (e.g.

YouTube videos)?

Answer: This seems to be the case, but there are certain commonalities. There are

certain characteristics that make a message go viral. Usually this is something that

triggers some kind of extreme emotion while receiving the message. The ease by which

the receiver is able to spread the message is also crucial. Characteristics like these are

common to anything that goes viral, but viral messages usually spread without the need

of a strategic push. In case of viral marketing of digital products, however, companies

need to define a strategy to create, package, and orchestrate the delivery of such a

message.

Question 2: What are the steps an organisation needs to take while considering,

designing and executing a viral marketing campaign using social media?

Answer: Any company wanting to market their product through viral marketing

campaigns using social media needs to go through following steps:

Strategy

o An overall business and marketing strategy should be developed keeping

in mind the core capabilities of the company


o Marketing strategy should consider which channels should be used in

each markets they operate in, and look at whether viral marketing is

suitable for their markets or not

o Companies need to have a crisis management strategy in place. A viral

marketing campaign gone wrong or beyond the capabilities of the

company is capable of destroying a company’s brand.

Capabilities

o Companies need to evaluate the human resource capabilities and make

sure that staff is working towards set goals. Quite often, social media

responsibilities are just tagged on in addition to other responsibilities. If

clear goals are not set and time allocated to perform these tasks, it would

be hard to get achieve any results.

o Companies need to evaluate their system capabilities, especially in the

case of marketing digital products. A successful viral marketing campaign

can result into exponential growth in traffic. Failure to deal with such

traffic can result in damaging the brand.

Product

o The product itself has to be outstanding in what it does. Viral marketing is

all about customers sharing their experiences and nobody wants to spoil

their reputation by recommending a bad product.

o The product should be designed for social spread. The user should be able

to invite other users, recommend the product, share it with their network

with ease.

Influencers

o Marketers need to identify key influencers in each marketing channels

and should ideally involve them at the time of designing the product.


o Marketers need to understand what influences their key influencers and

should be able to influence them to share

Executing and managing a campaign

o Marketers should evaluate how many influencers to seed.

o Once the campaign is launched, marketers need to have the right tools to

monitor and manage the spread of the campaign and engage with their

customers, especially when negative feedback is received.

Question 3: Once a viral marketing campaign is successful, what should an

organisation do to sustain the customer’s interest?

Answer: Sustaining the exponential growth, achieved through successful viral marketing

campaign, over a long period is very difficult, but not impossible. However, a more

realistic goal for marketers would be to increase the average growth following a

successful campaign, perhaps closely followed by yet another version of product or

campaign to keep the customers continuously interested in the product and the brand.

6.2 Personal reflections

One of the key challenges in writing this paper has been to not sound like a social media

evangelist. With the amount of information being available specifically on social media and

how organisations are creating social media strategy, many a times it was quite easy to drift

away from the core topic of viral marketing using social media into a more generic social

media space. This was especially true during the secondary research as there is a lot of

interesting information being made available on the internet on general usage of social

media.

Also, before starting the research I envisaged the paper to be about exploring whether a

framework exists around the specific characteristics of a product, or of a marketing

campaign, that businesses could use for their products to go viral. As I delved deeper in this


area, it slowly became apparent that there is a lot more to viral marketing of digital

products than just a good campaign.

6.3 Contribution to existing knowledge

The results of the research provide insights into how marketers perceive viral marketing and

social media marketing in the real world. Following areas stand out in particular:

Viral messages and viral marketing campaigns for digital products are subtly

different in the way of using viral marketing as part of the overall marketing strategy

with specific objectives in mind

Even though there is research and theoretical models for understanding, creating

and executing viral marketing campaigns, in real life the tools available to marketers

aren’t sophisticated enough to manage and monitor all aspects of such campaigns.

Organisations are continuously struggling with resource availability for any kind of

social media marketing, unless it is well thought out at the business strategy level.

The outcome of the interviews provides insights into how companies are using social

media and viral marketing concepts in real life to market their products and services.

It also provides insights into the importance of overall business and marketing

strategy while considering viral marketing as an option to market products.

The research is relevant to marketers and organisations planning to use viral

marketing concepts to market their digital products using social media.

6.4 Business lessons

The research highlights that the businesses need to go back to the basics of strategy and

marketing when considering social media and viral marketing, rather than giving into the

buzz. Following points are of specific interest:


The research highlights the importance of overall business strategy, including goal

settings, and resource availability and allocation to achieve these objectives, while

considering social media or viral marketing.

Knowing who your customers are and where can you find them is important while

considering the type of marketing channels. The research suggests that this is quite

basic yet often overlooked aspect of the social media marketing.

Viral marketing by definition can become uncontrollable. Marketers need to

carefully consider if this is really the result they are hoping to achieve.

6.5 Further research

Due to the lack of time and resource availability the number of interviews in the primary

research was kept to just four. Further interviews with companies or professional social

media consultants and marketers - who have either used viral marketing to market their

digital products on social media, or are engaged in the viral marketing process as strategists,

policy makers or influencers - would add more authenticity to the results, or clarify them

further.

Mobile application being one of my interest area may have meant that I had a personal bias

in this area while performing the research and articulating the findings. Further research

with fresh perspective on other types of digital products like website, online services etc.

would further refine the results.

Sentiment analysis (netnography) is an emerging field. There are a lot of challenges yet to

be overcome, especially when it comes to automatically collecting and performing an

accurate sentiment analysis on the conversations that relate to a brand or product on a

variety of social networks. Once sentiment analysis becomes a mature field, further

research in this area should provide ways to better monitor and manage negative feedback

during marketing campaigns.


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Appendix A

Interview with Jenny Herbison and Rachel Armitage, Skyscanner.net

Interview conducted in person, Edinburgh, 8th March 2011

Transcribed – 2nd April 2011

KG: You just launched your mobile app a couple of weeks ago and the app has already been

downloaded 500,000 times. How did you go about marketing the app?

RA: We have done a number of different things in different markets. Within each of our

managed markets we have identified places where we need to be to get our app reviewed -

whether it’s an aggregate review site or a blogger who we need to appeal to to make sure

our app is reviewed. That’s had a massive difference.

KG: The viral marketing literature talks about finding the right influencers and seeding them

to spread the message. Is that what you think happened in your case?

JH: That’s absolutely how we have achieved this. The best example of doing that was that on

the review sites, we were very lucky that we had good contacts with journalists and

bloggers and we just sent them the information, they reviewed the app for us and then

there are people who trust these reviews and see them as authorities for that, and that’s

when you can see the downloads spikes when they have reviewed the app and given it five

stars. I think as much as anything, your product has to be strong and when you give a good

product to these people, they will give you a good review and that’s key.


KG: Did you do anything specific to find who the right bloggers are, or which review websites

you should go to?

RA: Yes, definitely. We do that within each market for other reasons. Aside from just

promoting the app, it is important for us to make sure we are on the radar of particular

influencers. We are better at that in certain markets than other

JH: It’s also research. We have a good PR agency. There’s a big crossover – our PR is not

offline anymore, it’s all online. We have to have those contacts. A lot of journalists are not

only writing for newspapers now, they are writing their blogs, they are writing for online

only publications and that’s key to make sure we are online and we have to have that

presence and PR.

KG: Is that mainly desk research or do you use any tools for your research, for example there

are lots of tools on twitter that look at influence, areas of interests, number of followers etc.

RA: Yes, and again it’s different for different markets. We make best use of tools where they

make sense and we certainly do manage SEO’s and making sure who is linking to us and how

those links are being passed on. There are a couple of tools that we started using that are

particularly helpful for tracking relationships. Raven is something we recently started to use.

Managing these contacts throughout the organisation is key whether it’s through SEO,

through PR or anything else. When do an app, we make sure there is an integrated view of

all the contacts.

JH: Also, the same people managing it is important as well. We have country specialists that

look after PR, SEO and all promotions ensuring that they can see the opportunities across


channels. So, they know that they can utilise their contacts across channels, whereas if you

have people working separately you do not get that joined up marketing approach.

KG: What did you in terms of capacity management i.e. to manage the number of hits on

your servers to downloads the app or hits on your website? Did you have to think about that

at all?

JH: That’s managed by our operations department. They have contingency of managing if

we suddenly have a surge in traffic. We have it all planned out and we have capacity to

manage say 30% more traffic to deal sudden surge

RA: When we were launching the app, a lot of planning went into that as to what was the

right time to launch it and making sure we had additional capacity. It becomes a bit harder

when we have spikes out of the blue.

JH: We recently had a spike because we were on the Italian TV and one of the main thing is

to figure out why there was a spike if we are not already expecting it. If we have knowledge

beforehand and expecting a spike we can warn operations to expect a spike. We also know

seasonality wise when the big months are for travelling so we have that planned out. So, in

the UK January is a big month and most European countries follow the same trend. When

we go into a new market, we have to look at those seasonality trends and make sure we

have the capacity to deal with the traffic.

KG: Did you use any special strategy for Social Media marketing at all?

JH: Again, it depends on the market and what works in the market. For each market we have

main networks and local networks that are tried and tested, but for the mobile app we used


different people as it’s the different audience and you cannot go with the same people. It’s

a different product, so we have to treat it differently. Everyone in the company was very

proactive in pitching the mobile app. It wasn’t just the specific people, but everyone in the

company. I emailed everyone in my LinkedIn profile to tell them about the app. Everyone in

the company really pushed it personally – via Facebook, emailing their friends. We have

Facebook pages per market and it was put up on those. It wasn’t seen as a marketing

department push, it was seen as a company push and the whole company got behind it

RA: In terms of making people aware of what the response of the app is, we have got

dashboards in the office where all of our operational stats and marketing stats are available

for the whole company. We have a specific mobile app dashboard where we can look at

each market separately and also an aggregate on how the sessions are doing and how the

downloads are doing. That’s quite motivating if you can get that kind of stats up.

KG: Do you measure emotions at all in terms of what people are saying about the app?

JH: We do not at the moment. It is something that’s coming. We are kicking off a project in

house. It’s a resource issue. The PR team certainly measure what is being said. We have

people who email us and every email gets a response, so we do track our reputation online,

but we are taking that one step forward looking at emotions online. We are not there yet.

JH: In my previous experience I worked with clients managing their reputation and looking

at negative emotions, but it’s all very well knowing them but unless you can action on it, it’s

useless. We were giving all this information to our clients, but they couldn’t action any of it

because they didn’t have the resource. That’s where Skyscanner is doing the right thing in

that we are just replying to every email that is coming into us. We reply to anything on


email, Facebook and Twitter but we cannot do anything beyond that. There are very few

organisations that have the time and resource to engage properly. Also, one thing you do

not want to do is to engage incorrectly because you will end up doing more harm.

RA: If you are dipping in and out, it is unsatisfactory to the user base.

KG: How many people do you have in the organisation that actively engage in or monitor

Social Media?

RA: it’s quite distributed actually. For instance, for people interacting with us through our

website we have one central point of contact. They will make sure that every email is at

least acknowledged and then if a more detailed response is required then it is filtered across

the organisation. For example, it is someone from the Spanish market getting in touch with

us and if this person cannot diagnose the issue and reply, then the query will go out Spanish

team who will then respond. In terms of Social Media, everyone monitors it – the tweets are

on our dashboard, but in terms of responding it’s within the marketing team

JH: We have an active Twitter account which is handled by our comms team, but then Barry

who is one of the cofounder is very active on twitter. I think having one of the cofounders

very active on it is also quite important. We also have specific people from each market who

update Twitter and Facebook pages and that’s on-going – it’s not something we go in and

out of, its constant.

KG: What kind of tools do you use for Social Media and have you come across any tool that

would allow you to work with multiple social networks? Do you find that to be an issue?


JH: We use a wide range of tools – for paid market channels, for search engine market

channels, for mobile app, for PR. We have to go to different places for each task and it is

very hard. For SEO we are currently using a mixture of Raven, Linkdex, SEOMoz. We also use

Basecamp for project planning and tracking. In terms of analytics we are big fans of Google

Analytics and the various other tools Google provides (Webmaster, Adplanner etc.) and

usually find that their free offering fulfils our needs. That said, for the mobile app, we use

Flurry which specifically tracks mobile sessions. There are some bespoke tools that you can

get. Some of the analytics companies can actually build a specific tool for your needs, but do

not think you can get one off the shelf that does everything. Also, Its very well having all the

data, but you really want tools that let you take action on that data. If there are no actions

that you can do, then it’s useless. There is a lot of resource goes into looking and analysing

the data, so you really want the tools to be tied up with actions and KPI’s.

KG: What are your views on the ROI of Social Media?

JH: One of the reasons why a lot of companies find Social Media quite difficult is that they

find it hard to link it to the KPI’s. The fact that search engines are linking to social networks

now will help the business case. Also, the ads and places on Facebook has had an impact

and it has made it possible for the businesses to see an ROI which we have not seen before

in social media.

RA: I think it’s still a long way to go though - it’s still early days. There are now mechanisms

to prove the ROI, but still the beginnings of the full benefits of the social media, but on the

other hand sometimes people get carried away, it’s just another way of engaging with your

audience, which we do well in other channels so it’s just translating that into social media.


Appendix B

Interview with Andrew Burnett, Urban Niche


Transcribed – 3rd April 2011

KG: Andrew, could you tell us about your background and how you got into Social Media?

AB: I come from a design background. Way back in 1995 I went to Switzerland and did an

apprenticeship there as a graftsman. I started getting really heavily into vinyl records and

started playing these records in parties with friends. We then started designing our own

flyers. I came back in 2001 and started working with Adobe. The taught me the postscript

workflow for print. Then I went and worked with Macromedia who were looking for a print

specialist. I learnt about HTML, Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks etc. while at Macromedia. So

I got really involved in the web stuff and found it really fascinating. I used to interact with

their users during the day and at night I used to use their products to create various things

like animations, building websites etc. Adobe took over Macromedia in 2005 and I then

decided to do something for myself in 2006. First client I got was spending 20000 pounds a

month on Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising on Google. I helped them get on the page ranks

organically and at the end of 12 months they were spending 6000 pounds instead of 20000

pounds a month. In 2007 people really started talking about Social Media and the more I

read about it was all about forums, blogs, StumbleUpon etc. and I thought I am already

doing this, so that how I got into it. So, I have been doing it since 2001-2 almost but never


knew what it was called until maybe 3-4 years ago. I know run a Social Media agency called

Urban Niche.

KG: Your company is known for promoting messages in viral fashion. What is it that you

think makes something go viral?

AB: You need an emotional trigger for anything to go viral. Most people think of viral as

being funny, but it doesn’t need to be funny at all. It could be something that’s informative,

or something that’s tragic – even something like video of JFK getting shot and different

conspiracy theories attached to it, that’s a viral object in itself and that’s not something

done in a humorous way, but you need to have an emotional trigger. A really good example

is parents. As a parent you are always really proud of your kids – it doesn’t matter what the

quality is…if your kid does a drawing, for you it’s much better than any drawing done by the

next kid, so if you can tap into that emotion, that’s where you can get the viral potential

coming out.

KG: What do you think is the role of influencers when it comes to companies trying to create

a viral campaign for their products or services?

AB: Finding specific influencers can be important to a degree, but it’s a cynical company that

tries to do that. There are definitely people who influence things. I help put 10 million extra

hits to a website in 2009 - that was a client of mine, but it still have to have genuine content

on it. In the social web, the main currency is endorsement. We very rarely handle in cash,

very rarely handle in links as we do in traditional web in terms of SEO. So, it’s all

endorsement and if I am going to endorse something in my name, it needs to be bloody

good – it cannot be OK or mediocre. I am getting asked to endorse upwards of 200 things a


day, so I really need to be able to look at something and very quickly say that’s really good

and that’s worth getting endorsed. In fact, I am being sent around 600 things to look at

daily, but out of things that I am being asked to endorse, there are certain things that are

just spam that I can ignore straight away, some are OK but they are not really good, so at

the end of it I am putting my name to around 100-200 things daily.

KG: As much as that? And how do you spread the message – is it through Twitter or Blogs?

AB: Through every network imaginable – through Twitter…actually a lot of things do come

through Twitter because it is used to share these links, so a lot of asking for endorsement

isn’t a specific request but it just appears in your stream and there are people who you

trust, so you endorse their things and then there is a reciprocal nature to it that people who

trust you will endorse your things, but it has to be a two way exchange. It then comes back

to the fact that if something is genuinely worth talking about, it reaches a certain critical

mass and then it takes off by itself – and that’s what an actual viral is. A really good example

is that I got asked by a bank, which shall remain nameless, to help promote some YouTube

clips that they had. Each of these clips were 15 seconds long and these were add-ins that

were shown before and after the adverts on commercial TV and what they did was that they

took exact same advert that was on TV and put it on YouTube and after 4 weeks that had

something like 60 views on one of the videos. In total there were 6 videos and each of them

had a similar number of viewings, which didn’t even equate to their entire marketing

department watching the video once a day. I had a look at it and I said to them that there is

nothing I can do because the content is useless. On the back of it they spent 7000 thousand

pounds to buy 10000 views and basically there is a call centre somewhere in South East Asia

where people sit there and for a couple of pence watch YouTube videos. So you can buy


these views but that’s not something that I am in slightest of interest in doing because there

is zero value in actually doing it. For the same amount of money, what we could have done

is we could have taken some outtakes from the video that they had produced, and we could

have made something relatively funny. It wouldn’t have been a hugely viral video but it

would have got at least as many views organically from people who maybe actually want to

use those services that the bank was offering, which is the whole purpose of doing it in the

first place. So, things like that can and do happen all the time.

KG: I came across something similar on Twitter in that there are services that offer you

thousands of followers for a little bit of cash. What do you think of that?

AB: Yes, I get them following me all the time. A really big give away for somebody doing that

is that they may be following say 2000 people and they have got little or no following. That’s

one of the ways I quickly look and identify if that’s a spammer or not. Obviously it’s not

always the case though, for instance if a brand wants to allow people to direct message

them they will follow a lot more people than people following them. So, there are

exceptions to it. So, yes these mechanisms exist but there is zero quality behind it i.e.

getting thousands of followers who are worth nothing. It takes real effort to build your

presence and ultimately you want to be engaging with individual people and that takes real

effort too.

KG: When you go about creating a viral marketing campaign for a product or service, how do

you then share the message?

AB: Sharing it can be as simple as one single tweet. Vast majority of it is just sharing stuff

and I do not get paid for it. The actual hours that I get paid for is maybe 10% of the total


hours I put in. There’s a lot of network maintenance that goes in there, a lot more than

there is money in it. A recent bad example is the Charlie Sheen story, and I do not get tied

into all the celebrity stuff but it could be a picture of a tweet that he did that you push

towards critical mass as an example, and you generally speaking you have between 20%-

40% success rate.

KG: What do you mean by 20%-40% success rate, can you please elaborate?

AB: That’s the success rate of things that actually achieve this magic number that could be

called as the critical mass for anything to go viral i.e. if goes beyond you pushing the

message

KG: OK, so how do you go about spreading the marketing message and what is this critical

mass and how do you know when something has reached this critical mass?

AB: There are two things to it – one is the actual networks that do the promotional things.

It’s a relatively tight knit community – there are probably a couple of hundred people that

are really any good, maybe 500 but no more than that – and this is global. These are your

influencers / endorsers who are not celebrities. So, if Stephen Fry retweets you, of course it

is going to big because he is got millions of followers on Twitter, but the people who have

got 2000 followers can pull a lot of right strings in the background. Of those people there

are around 500 max. Basically, you all work together, not in a financial sense at all, but there

are favours you trade. So, the reason I need to do anything that’s good is because if I pass

anything that’s rubbish onto these guys then they will say, “Andrew doesn’t get it, so we are

not going to pass him anything”, and this is like a spiral. You basically ask them that if they

like the message then could they spread the word on whichever networks they are part of?


For example, it could be Reddit, StumbleUpon, Digg or whatever, but always if you

genuinely like it because you will have to put your name to it. So that’s one side of it, the

other side is that you have a product that you want to get traction and you have create a

good message then a lot of news websites and blogs start writing about it. Blogs have a lot

of stigma attached to them, but you will be surprised to know how many websites are

actually run on Wordpress. So, these blogs will create content about your product. These

blogs then reach out to power users on various networks because they want readership and

they say, “Have you seen this story?”. And then the whole thing starts getting attention. All

the links from the blogs get shared on these networks and you also get secondary benefits

of SEO from it. And people then talking about it gets converted into downloads. A good

example of it is the work I did with Channel4 in 2008-09 when they had a mobile app that

measured how much alcohol you are drinking. It was aimed at the young market and it went

through a similar process.

KG: Is there a measure of critical mass? How do you know when something has reached a

point where it will go viral?

AB: It is usually very intuitive. You can use thinks like PostRank, Google Analytics at the

domain level. You can measure things like how many mentions did your blog get, how many

tweets were written about it, which pieces of content within your site got more attention. I

look at things at a much more granular level just now. I am looking at a system called

Trak.ly. You give this system a RSS feed or even an URL and the system monitors what’s

happening on that URL – It’s still in beta but it looks at services like StumbleUpon, Facebook,

Twitter etc. and tracks what is happening on these networks that is specific to the URL that

you give it. Digg and StumbleUpon are good networks that give you a lot of traffic overtime


if the content is good. People are really sceptical these days about marketing, more so in the

social web. So you really need to come up with genuinely good content and once you do,

people will talk about you. There is a concept of Social Object – something people talk

about. It could be an iPad or a blog etc.

KG: Have you come across a good example of a digital product that is designed in a way that

helps its users spread the message? Have you heard of Viber and what do you think about it

in this respect?

AB: Yes, I have Viber on my phone. The guys at Viber have been really clever in the way they

have designed the app. You can automatically access your phone book through Viber and

the app looks through that to see who else is using Viber. It lets you text users to say, “Hey I

am using Viber, why don’t you?”. As soon as you do that, it’s a good product and makes it

easier to find people – you do not need to know their Skype name etc. – it just becomes

really easy for users to spread the word. It’s cheap, its user friendly and it makes it really

easy for me to contact others to ask them to use it as well. Yes, of course I will spread the

message. It’s a no brainer. As soon as you give something to people, where they do not even

need to think, that’s really it. People’s attention spans are so short these days and you really

need to capture people’s attention very quickly and allow them to do things in real time

without any effort at all. And that’s what social media consultancies should really be about –

helping companies create products and services to achieve this – take the decision away

from people or make it so easy that they do not even have to think about it. To an extent it’s

the freemium model. Do I want my choice of free music anytime of the day and night? Yes,

of course I do. Spotify is a great example. Do the ads annoy me? Maybe a bit, but do they

annoy me enough to pay 10 pounds a month? Not yet! They might do! Spotify has reached 1


million paying subscribers and they have got around 7 million total users. So, 1 in 7 is not

too bad and they get ad impressions as well.

KG: What tools do you use to track what people are talking about in the social web?

AB: For tracking I use a tool called Raven, which is mainly for SEO but they have some really

good social things in there, and it does in on a domain level. For granular things, which is

when you are promoting an individual URL, I use Trak.ly. If we are just starting something

new, then I use PostRank. I have used Radian6 in the past, but to be honest it’s more than

you need. There is another couple of people from Edinburgh who have created a tool called

SoDash, they monitor social space at the domain level as well. So, these are the main tools I

use. I do not think Klout is any good, it’s entirely gameable. The idea behind it is good, but

it’s very difficult to measure the clout on the social web. To measure influence of an

individual, the best thing to ask to see the Google Analytics of their clients, ask to see how

much traffic they have driven. Have a look at their social space.

KG: What are your thoughts on sustaining the level of interests once a product or service

goes viral?

AB: Either you consistently create engaging content that’s going to get spike after spike after

spike, or you should look at it in a way that when you create a spike you increase the

average traffic towards the product/service or the website. So, the plateau after the spike

should be higher than the one before if you have done it cleverly. If you have not done it

cleverly the plateau will be the same and if you have done it stupidly the average will

actually be lower. So, do it cleverly you could for instance incentivise people to come back

the next day, you could create a game out of it. Peaks are more like ego boosts, it gives a lot


of adrenalin boost, but beyond that what you really want is sustainable increased traffic or

downloads. In terms of getting a spike, it varies, sometimes you will see a plateau for years

before you see the spike. If you want a spike at the launch, then you really need to find

individuals with clout (with a ‘c’), even involve them in the process of creating it.

Understand the socials sharing mechanics of what we are creating. Understand the viral

mechanisms that we can include within the product/services that we are creating. Again,

going back to Viber, if you can send your friends a message that you are using it and they

can use for free, of course people will do it but these things need to be built in right from

the start – that’s almost like an offline viral. You can also build in mechanisms to share

things online within the product, so for example let people talk about the product on

Twitter etc. then the chances are that when you launch you will get a lot more attention. It

is important to note that the earlier you engage the influencers, the better. Once you have

already done it, there isn’t much influencers can do to help design the product/service.


Appendix C

Interview with Colin Gilchrist, Social Media strategy consultant, SocialTailor.com


Transcribed – 3rd April 2011

KG: What are your views on what companies should do while considering whether or not to

develop viral marketing or social media marketing strategies?

CG: I am employed by businesses to put in a strategy for social media. Every business is very

different and people within it are very different, and their needs and wants are very

different. One of the first things that I look at is when they are developing their strategy,

they need to analyse and assess the employees throughout the business. One of my biggest

tasks is doing that before we start. One of the things I will never forget is being employed a

company – they had a member of staff that hated the company, hated the management but

they were working there because there was nowhere else to work. This is something that

has to be resolved before we could even think about any kind of strategy. Obviously, there is

then the issue of policy documents for the organisation, how individuals react outside the

business and if they are using a network like LinkedIn then who owns the profile – is that the

individual or the company? Little things that are unique to every business. One of the other

things for big corporations is that they need to know that there brand is protected, so what

we need to put in place is crisis management. Crisis strategy in this case, the bottom line is


that you are listing all the potential things that could go wrong and are likely to go wrong –

and what you are doing is for instance identifying keywords. This is so that when something

happens you can buy them from Google. When people search for these keywords you direct

the traffic to a crisis site and be prepared. The site can have videos from the CEO for

instance. So, this is all done long before you can think about the strategy for the businesses.

Loads of people, especially SME’s miss all of this. You basically need to cover yourself before

you look at strategy. In terms of the strategy, you need to look at content strategy, in fact

there are lots of different elements you need to look at, but you need to figure out who is

doing what? What is that you want to achieve – is it just more sales or is brand awareness,

who is going to deliver it, etc.? I am usually brought into the business usually by their

advertising agency or marketing agency. We do training needs analysis with the key people

and figure what tools to use for a specific business. Then it’s a case of identifying the key

people within various divisions that are able to deliver, monitor and manage these kind of

things. Then you have a Community Manager appointed within the business who is going to

manage all this. My role, having done the training and creating strategy, is then to monitor

all the overall activity and provide assessment, analysis, activity reports and keep them on

the right path. What strategy works for one company can be very different to another

company depending on the people within a company. You have to also get your internal

communications right, so that people are doing exactly the same things between different

departments. They all need to speak the same language and this get very complex. So, all

this is a huge task and takes months and months to sort out.

KG: So, do you consider all sorts of media when you look at the strategy or is it specific to

social media?


CG: Yes, it all has to be integrated. So for instance you might be working with the advertising

and marketing agencies and for example if you are working with a restaurant you need to

consider menu change, look at the point of sale, things that are on the counter or on the

tables – the leaflets that are lying around – they all have to be integrated. The social media

also takes a lot of resource if you want to be proactive, so the management has to consider

if it is a wise things to say, have a Twitter account for the business, and if so then who in the

company will monitor and manage the engagement with the customers. For example, I am

working with a company that has a Twitter account and they have 6 people managing one

account, they all have abbreviations at the end of their name. What they do is scan and

responding to customers on Twitter. There is another Twitter account for events i.e. for

pushing information, and there is another account purely for marketing and PR stories etc.

So, they have different policies for every Twitter account and it states very clearly on each

account as to what it is used for. So, the companies need to think about what tool is best for

them and how to use social media for doing different things, and how you integrate that

into your overall strategy.

KG: And what is your role in doing these specific tasks?

CG: As a strategist, I do not do any of these specific things. It’s all about finding the people

who are very good at things like Facebook applications, landing pages, blogs, YouTube,

people who are good at delivering the right message etc. In 2009 I was in Las Vegas with

Zappos. In the first 6 years of its existence the company made no money, but Tony (The CEO

of Zappos) was determined that his staff will be happy and his customers are going to be

happy, so he invested heavily in making sure his staff had the best of everything they

needed. They have restaurant where they get free food, they have a breakout area etc.


Everything was thought about to the nth degree. There will always be someone who is

unhappy but more often than not it’s the outside influence than the inside influence. Not

every business can do all that Zappos have done, but it is important to recognise that if they

are going to have a really success at having brand awareness ambassadors within the

business. Businesses really need to think about their staff first, internal first!

KG: What are views on whether organisations understand what social media can do for

them and getting a buy in from the top level executives in the organisation?

CG: It’s a real challenge. What we are trying to do is to educate the businesses that if people

love their jobs, they will talk about it, and all of a sudden brand awareness can be taken to

the next level. There are lots and lots of things that can be done, but it’s a big buy in and a

lot of these companies do not like change. They do however understand that if you tell

somebody else, then they will be aware of your business, and if they are aware of your

business they might buy some of what you are offering. So, there are lots of little arguments

from these old school managers because they hate the idea that someone could talk bad

about them. This is why you need to do this crisis management exercise first, because when

they buy into the crisis management plan, they are relieved that if something goes wrong,

they are covered.

KG: Have you come across any companies using social media for viral marketing of

products?

CG: My experience stems from a friend of mine named Hugh McLeod (author of the book

Ignore Everybody: And 39 other Keys to Creativity), who was blogging back in 1998-99, who

completely transformed this wine company. Way back in 2002-03 Hugh was at this dinner


and he liked this particular wine. He tried to find this wine but couldn’t find anywhere in the

shops, so he phoned up the vineyard. The vineyard said to him that they were surprised that

he had it because they didn’t export the wine and somebody must have brought it back with

them. So, Hugh said to the vineyard that he wanted to promote the wine in the UK, so they

gave him some money and loads of wine. He had these dinners up and down the country

where he invited lots of bloggers – this is way before twitter when blogging was big. He said

to them, “ look if you like the wine, then just write about it in your blog and if you write

about it I will give you another bottle”. So, there were all these blogs that were written

about this wine. He printed them all off and knocked on the doors or all the major

superstore chains – Tesco, Asda, Waitrose etc. – and within about 3 years, from importing

about 50 cases a year, they were importing around 250,000 cases a year – and this was all

because of these blogs – just spreading the word about the wine and why cannot you buy it

here. Hugh was also behind Threshers 40% wine vouchers. He convinced Threshers that

there are only about handful of people coming to our website, why do not we offer them

40% off if they print this voucher and buy it from the shop. This voucher idea went viral and

Threshers had to value all the vouchers around the UK. The whole idea was a mistake, but

Threshers honoured it. Threshers obviously made some money though because it ran for

more than one year.

KG: Have you had any other experiences with viral marketing?

CG: I personally do not have a lot of experience with it, but we a while ago we created a

video with puppets singing songs that went viral. It was just as an experiment to see if we

could get the company to break into new areas. But that way mainly by chance rather than

by design. We were just testing some concepts in the market. But, having chatted to a CEO


of a media company, what he does is that he creates lots and lots of small case studies with

the clients brand to see what works and on what platform, and if one particular thing works

then he would pour lots of money into it to do it properly. So, often, little quirky things will

happen and you wonder where the hell did that come from and they might not have the

brand or product in it – just to see what works. Volkswagen’s sponsorship of steps with

musical notes in a train station and musical bins in a park1 in Sweden and great case studies

for something like that. Volkswagen’s brand only appears as association at the very end but

it does something good for the environment or health, and they use the technology in their

cars as BlueMotion technology. Creating something that could go viral takes a lot of

thought, work and time.

KG: What are you views on how the businesses can go about finding people who could be

used to spread the message, similar to bloggers that you mentioned earlier?

CG: There are lots and lots of different ways. For example, AllTop.com which is an aggregate

news websites, advanced blog search through blogsearch.google.com (you can identify

people by geography, particular interest etc.). You can also look at something like Klout to

assess what their reach is out with their own blog. I write a blog for a magazine and in last

few months I have had regular visitors in hundreds and already companies are approaching

me to promote their products. Normally it may take years to establish yourself, but if you

are clever about how you position yourself you can speed it up. Also, a blog is not corporate,

it’s opinionated. Finding blogs that are opinionated but will also talk about your product is

important. They cannot always be bought, it depends on the ethics on them, but if they can

1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=US&v=2lXh2n0aPyw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=US&v=2lXh2n0aPyw


be bought it’s probably not good for you the companies. So, you just have look around and

find your way, and you got to look for people who are good in a particular sector.

KG: Once you have identified the influencer, how do you go about measuring the success of a

campaign, monitoring and measuring it?

CG: I use a company called Forth Matrix. It is a business that does exactly that. They will tell

you your brand spread, not from the keywords, but from the actual conversations. They will

track back all the visitors on the website on the back of your release of some information.

Instead of having to look at separate tools like Google Analytics, Social Mention etc., Forth

Matrix does everything for you.

KG: Do they look at all social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, other review websites

etc.?

CG: Yes, they look at everything. So, for example if you are Cadburys and you have releasing

a new product, you send out the release to specific people to write about it, Forth Matrix

can track everything, anything that has ever been on internet, not just on social media.

KG: Once you have successfully made a product message go viral, is there a way to make it

sustainable?

CG: It cannot be made sustainable. The concept of viral by its very nature is based on virus

that spreads and then dies. To sustain it is like trying to keep someone happy all the time –

it’s never going to happen, because to experience real happiness you have to be miserable

at some point. To make and sustain, what you want is steady growth. Once it’s spiked it’s

great, but then let’s have a steady growth, and then another peak and then another peak.


Trying to sustain the spike is very very difficult. This is because what you are doing is you are

shocking people to get them interested. To constantly shock people, the campaign has to be

so entertaining that everyone is going to love it, but you will never be able to make

everyone happy and sustain it. It’s very very unusual

KG: I was following this app on Twitter in December last year, it’s called Viber. They had a

million downloads in just 5 days. My initial reaction was that this must just be a spike and it

will die down, but then I had a look at their downloads in February this year and they had

achieved 10 million downloads. I found it fascinating that they were able to sustain that kind

of interest. What do you think could be the reasoning behind it?

CG: It’s about getting a community to grow. To get a million downloads in just 5 days you

have seed the idea with very influential people, so first of all you have to identify very

influential people and speak to them. In case of digital products, you could perhaps engage

with those first wave users, do polls and surveys and get their feedback to tweak the

product and let them spread the message forward.


Appendix D

Email interview with Tera Dargavel, Online community manager at KIK interactive, Inc.

Interview via email questionnaire, April 10th, 2011

1. Are all digital products suitable for viral marketing?

TD: Yes. Viral marketing is not limited to certain products because the way that anything is

marketed is by telling a story that people are going to relate to or connect with. The way

that the story is told can be done in any medium (film, picture, etc.) and as we have seen -

an infographic is just as able to go viral on the Internet as a well done video. So, I believe

that, at this point, all digital products are able to be marketed in a way that allows for viral

distribution because if the piece of content can be found on the Web then it has the

potential to be distributed virally. I don't think that in marketing there is such thing as

reaching too wide of an audience - so whether your digital product can actually be used by a

niche audience there is no harm in any marketing effort going viral.

2. What does a company need to do before they consider viral marketing as a method to

market their products/services i.e. company level strategy, capacity management etc.?

TD: Always remember that viral marketing is still marketing. It needs to tell a story and

engage the audience with the product or service and the brand. It must be on-brand - it can

be quite confusing to see a very off-brand viral marketing effort (for example, Groupon's


superbowl commercial - I don't think the company wants to be seen as insensitive and

cutthroat). Viral marketing is a large effort too - the medium must be decided on, the

marketing story and how it is going to be presented and then the distribution efforts. Often,

the medium is a video and the content involves something that makes people feel sympathy

(or empathy), or is something humorous, or is something extraordinary to witness. Then the

marketing content must be distributed across the Web and become high frequency, after

that there is not much that can be done - it's up to the audience to start sharing that

content with their friends.

It's important to remember that marketing efforts have to be very high-quality. The story

and messaging has to make sense and align with the brand - because people nowadays are

much more savvy about marketing and can see right through blatant, selfish efforts to get as

many eyes on the company name and message as possible. That's the last thing, before

attempting to market something virally ask "what is this piece of content going to give back

to people and how" - usually you can discover some way that people benefit from a piece of

content.

3. How to create a viral marketing campaign i.e. - the role of influencers, quality of products,

creative content (video etc.)?

TD: I sort of answered this above - you can follow a number of paths to viral marketing by

brainstorming and creating the content for the product, and then by distributing it on the

Web and making it very easy to share the content with friends (i.e., do not put it behind a

pay wall! It will never go viral). Influential places, like certain websites, are often targeted

more than just specific people.


For example, in the app space you may really hope that your news (press releases, blog

posts) gets picked up by Hacker News because it's one of the most widely read news sources

for Silicon Valley and the tech industry. You may try to distribute your content to journalists

at various publications (Huffington Post, Tech Crunch, etc.) or you may just submit it to

Reddit or other link collecting sites like that. Again, there is no tried and true method to viral

marketing but there are best practices.

4. How to measure the spread of the message and return on investment?

TD: The return on investment is going to be different for every viral marketing case. The

spread of the message is much easier to monitor and measure. You need to use any of the

many, many analytics tools or social media listening tools that is available on the Web.

There are many free tools and there are also more powerful tools that one pays for. What

these tools do is listen to either the whole web or just parts of it. For example, HootSuite is

very useful for monitoring Twitter. You search for keywords, your product name, your @

mentions, etc. and you are able to respond to tweets and aggregate information.

Often, the spread of the message can be measured by how many times it has been tweeted

and liked. Say, the viral marketing content was a video you can measure where it's been

watched, if it's on YouTube you can see how many views it has had - there are lots of ways

to measure spread and everyone does it a little differently. Return on investment is much

harder. What was the goal of the video? Was that achieved? Whether it was to make a

brand name a household name or to actually get more people to buy Old Spice deodorant -

each company and brand is going to measure success differently.

5. How to manage the positive and negative conversation on social networks?


TD: The only way to ever feel like the conversations on social networks are manageable is by

constantly monitoring them, and using discretion as to when, as a brand, to jump in and

respond. You must have a powerful tool, usually a dashboard, that makes it easier to see

and respond to conversations happening on different social networks. Commonly, the

conversations that a brand, especially a start-up brand, can take part in occur on Twitter and

on blogs. A brand, or even a company representative, is much more able to answer

questions or concerns in blog comments or by responding to tweets. Negative conversations

are usually mediated by explanation.

6. Is it possible to make such campaigns sustainable in medium to long terms? If so, then

how?

TD: In a way - I think that it is possible. Viral marketing is meant to be consumed quickly - a

piece of content going viral is usually quite popular for a week or so - it accumulates huge

amounts of views and sharing and then it dies away. But, take a look at Old Spice - I think

they're trying to make their viral marketing campaign a little more long lasting. Their

marketing now has a theme - the Old Spice Guy - and they are able to make many pieces of

content that share that same theme that went viral in the first place. So, when you have a

good idea you can stick with it and reiterate - but there is a fine line between a theme and

overkill.


Appendix E

Twitterverse – Brian Solis & JESS3


Appendix F

1. (Aaker & Smith 2010) - Four winged framework to get amplification: All four

“wings” of the dragonfly act in concert. The first wing is focus: what is your single

small, concrete goal? That goal should be measurable over time so you see how

close you’re getting to it. The second wing is grabbing attention, making people look.

That is very similar to more traditional means of marketing. The third wing is

engagement, telling the story, which also has been important in the past. But how do

you enable action on the part of employees and customers? That is very new to the

social-media world. When you execute on these four wings—when four small acts

are taken in concert—that’s when you get amplification or infectious action

2. (Dye 2000) - List of powerful tactics for creating a VM campaign: Seed the vanguard

i.e. the influencers, Ration supply, Exploit icons, Tap the power of lists, Nurture the

grass roots

3. (Kozinets et al. 2010) - Four important factors that influence WoM: Its placement

within character narratives or the personal stories related to particular character

types, particular forums where the WOM communication takes place, the affect of

communal norms that govern the expression, transmission and reception of a

message and its meanings, and the effect of the promotional characteristics of a

WOM campaign over its message and meaning.

4. (Kozinets et al. 2010) – WoM campaigns based on the type of product: Technology

and other high involvement products would tend to naturally inspire more

evaluation, while fashion and entertainment products result in more embracing


narratives. Hard-sell offers result in more explanation and evaluation, while soft-sell,

long-term brand-building campaigns inspire endorsing or embracing narratives.

WOMM programs that overtly seek recommendations, mentions, or reviews may

encourage narrative responses using the evaluation strategy.

Education

Viral marketing of digital products using social media - MBA Dissertation