Back in December Sony setup a viral marketing campaign that was faced with an onslaught of criticism and eventually backfired, “All I Want For Xmas is a PSP”. Having a fake blog for a fake blogger with fake user comments is not easy to pull off. If you’re not one of them, they’ll know, and word spreads fast. The campaign failed so miserably that Sony tried taking it off the web. Ineffectively (since it was considered such a gem; in terms of mass embarrassment) that the web community couldn’t let it disappear, taking Sony for a ride.
Why did it fail? Besides constantly reminding you that “this is not an Ad” when it was blazingly obvious, it lacked humor, and had nothing valuable to say about the PSP. The entire campaign could almost be perceived as a mockery of web content and culture, the viral video advertisement being the best example of this.
The web generation is too informed and has the attention span of a three year old with a caffeine buzz. They want humor, creativity, and wit and they are always on the look-out for new content.
In contrast to the couch potatoes waiting to be fed entertainment, they demand interaction and choice, the ability to run the show as much as they can, instead of being rendered into a comatose state in front of a preprogrammed flickering screen.
The need for viral marketing points out one of the major flaws of search engines today. The search engines fail to understand people. They’re good at handling text but are currently weak in the realm of video and audio. The search engines can’t tell apart a picture of a skydiver from a video of a cute chubby kitty. The search engine is a heartless machine. So people replace the search engines and pass content around, filtering the good from the bad. An example of this in action is StumbleUpon Content is effectively filtered out with a rating system and comments that a person or persons can write about stumbled sites.
In viral marketing the trick is to catch peoples’ attention and let them advertise for you by word of mouth. It can be any multimedia but video is preferred since it’s visual and can be shared easily and embedded into blogs where it can spread further around the web.
In the end things like e-mail, blog, or social networking site spamming might seem cost efficient initially, but you risk getting blacklisted by organization like the Spamhaus Project and unpopular with users. It makes what you’re trying to sell appear a scam or cheap.
Pestering your users and lying to them isn’t going to win you their favor or money, honest participation will.