Viral Marketing - From Def Jam Diet To Sue Simmons

photo credit: unNickrMe

You might wonder what Def Jam Diet, Sue Simmons and viral marketing have in common? Everything. Read on and you’ll see!

Viral marketing has been around for forever, and is basically word of mouth. If you’re a blogger, you know what a viral post means and the benefits it can bring. It’s very, very hard to make a post, or any product get viral advertising, just because the process is so unpredictable.

The masses can propagate a subject with the speed of light, and the sudden burst in publicity can often be too much to take, but for the ones that will ride the wave, it’s a gold mine. For example, let’s say you have a farmer that loves manure. He made himself a little blog about manure, where he even posts pictures he takes. Nobody reads his blog, and he’s almost giving up, until one day he finds one of his posts on the front page of Digg. Somehow, people loved it and dug it many times, so now he has millions coming to his blog and using up his bandwidth. Next thing you know, the local newspaper found his article too and contacted him for an interview. Our farmer is now on Oprah, that’s how famous he got. He’s considered an expert on manure and lately everybody has been asking him for advice about it.

I know, it’s a far-fetched story, but I was trying to make a point about how effective and powerful viral marketing is.

To further analize viral marketing, I chose two very different examples that went viral very recently:

• The “Def Jam Diet”

 Although there’s been a lot of talk about it, you might not be sure what it is. Basically, it’s a bogus, mythical diet that the stars are supposedly on. It’s like a modern, hip-hop version (Jay-Z is thought to be on it), of an older detox diet that is keeping the stars fit and makes them lose weight. Nobody knows what it is, who’s on it, or any detail about it, which makes it pretty unlikely to even exist.

Why would a diet that doesn’t even exist get this much publicity? There are two things in this equation that are and have been very successful for a while: gossip about stars, and diets for losing weight. Pretty much everything a star does becomes viral right away, especially if it’s controversial. A star on a secret diet that everybody’s dying to find out what it is, it’s bound to be news.

It all started out of the blue, some people heard some other people talking about it, that heard it at a party in Hollywood directly from the stars, then of course the tabloids, offline and online, published the news, making it viral.

This was an unintentional promotion, and nobody benefits from it. If there were a real diet, the person that invented it would be filthy rich by now with all this publicity. I’m sure there are people out there that are thinking to take advantage of the huge viral publicity the diet already got and come up with some pills called Def Jam.

• Sue Simmons and the F word

Sue Simmons is a news anchor for WNBC-TV. On Monday night, May 12, 2008, she was following a story that got the wrong video tape on, so she shouted “What the F*** are you doing?”. The next day, her story became viral.

To be honest, I don’t watch TV and before reading this online I had no idea who Sue Simmons was. Now I know, and not because of her long, succesful career, but because she said the F word on TV!

Again, this was not a planned marketing strategy, the viral effect just happend because of the controversy around that word on TV. If this is good or bad for miss Simmons in the long run, I don’t know, but for now she is on the front page of newspapers, and suddenly became more popular across the world than she’s ever been before.

Conclusion

Viral marketing is the most efficient form of marketing, and the hardest to achieve. You can buy ads on all the major blogs online, and still not get viral, just because the masses are the ones who choose. The campaign for promoting a product can be huge, and costly, and though it might sell well, it could never become viral.

There are some things you can do to help the effect take place: be creative. People are more likely to talk about original ideas, than something they’ve seen 1oo’s of times before. Be controversial. The two previous examples were both controversial, which is why the public loved them. Place your “ticking bomb” into strategical places, and wait for the effect to take place, which might never happen. But if it does…be prepared for the ride!

I hope you’ve enjoyed the post, please subscribe or leave me a comment! What do you think about viral marketing?

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