Review: How to Viral Market Reviewed by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson Web Marketing Today - Apr 7, 2009

How to Viral Market (MarketingSherpa Toolkit)
MarketingSherpa, 2008
Spiral bound, 8-1/2 x 11, 69 pages

Viral marketing is easy to understand: Create something that generates buzz and is so cute / fascinating / fun / bizarre that it gets passed by viewers to their friends via e-mail and social networks -- thousands of times -- so that it propels more and more people to your website, and, hopefully, helps enhance your brand, produce sales, and ultimately boost profits.

Sounds great! But how do you actually create a viral marketing campaign? How do you do this? MarketingSherpa's How to Viral Market toolkit combines research, experience, and case studies of successful viral marketing campaigns to help answer that question.

The book consists of four parts:

1. Overview. Defines viral marketing, examines what is best and worst about a campaign, considers how to measure success, looks at budgets, and offers a planning overview.
2. The Planning Phase. Here's the real meat. The book considers creating personas to help define your target audience, explains how to seed a viral campaign and looks at viral tactics. These include: mircosites; games; polls, surveys, and quizzes; contests; widgets; eCards; podcasts; audio; and video.  It also outlines the four factors that enable you to predict viral success.
3. Spreadsheets and Tools. Includes worksheets that help you estimate labor costs and viral campaign expenses. Also offers a viral marketing timeline and a tracking / reporting chart.
4. Glossary of viral marketing terms.

Viral marketing sounds so ... inexpensive. Is it really? Beyond the flukes that no one can predict, this toolkit offers survey results of companies that have taken viral marketing seriously, gives actual cost ranges for a viral campaign, suggests which media seem to give the best results, and advises on the campaign goals that are most attainable. A great reality check!

The authors note that direct sales and an immediate revenue surge are not goals that you're most likely to attain through viral marketing. However, lead generation, brand recognition, and brand reinvigoration (if that is a word) are realistic outcomes.

The toolkit is especially helpful in outlining do's and don'ts with regard to game and video viral strategies. The authors offer specific recommendations for using YouTube, with tips on video equipment, lighting, sound, and filming. They also provide a viral video checklist.

Especially helpful features in this toolkit include:

• SherpaTips that are scattered through the chapters -- usually items that are overlooked by inexperienced viral marketers.
• Dozens of case studies. Most are outlined in the text. Some are references to articles on the MarketingSherpa site. Many treatments of viral marketing talk theory only, but are short on real-world examples -- not here. URLs to the examples aren't included in the book, but you can probably find each of these example by searching for the appropriate keywords on Google or YouTube.

I was especially interested in a special report on how to predict the success of a viral marketing campaign -- one of those nebulous unknowns. The authors outline the "social velocity" system developed by Jalali Harman, founder of social media firm Yovia. His company asked the question: What causes something to "go viral"? They concluded, among other things, that there were many variables, all working together, that were needed to stimulate viral growth. They distilled these down to the four Cs of Social Velocity (or viral growth):

1. Content
2. Connections
3. Community
4. Conversion

I'll resist the temptation to summarize these for you. Rather I strongly recommend that you purchase the How to Viral Market toolkit in order to study these in detail.  These are important clues to the "science" part of the art of viral marketing.

This is the best book on the nuts and bolts of viral marketing that I've read -- based on lots of solid experience and research! It's a bit pricey, so I don't expect the looky-lous to buy it. But if your company is serious about developing viral marketing strategies that will propel your campaigns into the stratosphere, this book will be one of your most important guides. Strongly recommended for serious marketers!

You can purchase a copy of the How to Viral Market toolkit from the SherpaStore. It is not available on Amazon.

Dr. Ralph F. Wilson is one of the pioneers of Internet marketing, founding the Web Marketing Today newsletter in 1995 at the beginning of the commercial Internet. In addition to developing scores of websites and online stores and consulting with many companies large and small, he is the author of hundreds of articles and more than a dozen books on Internet marketing and e-commerce.