The Key to Effective Viral Marketing is Emotional Engagement
Viral marketing is the process of using peer-to-peer communications in order to rapidly spread information about a brand or message. The term ‘viral’ stems from the concept of a ‘virus’, a self-perpetuating phenomenon which infects whatever it comes in contact with, spreading itself in an expanding outward arc. Your message is the virus. The carriers are your audience.
People encounter specific data or ideas daily and pass it on to their friends and other people in their network. All things equal, one can say that information is shared more rapidly when the recipient has a strong emotional connection with the specific message. They adore it. They despise it. They are deeply puzzled by it. It makes them upset. It makes them happy.
Emotions are inextricably a component of social communication. As humans, we share our emotional experiences as a way to express our individuality and maintain our relationship networks. In a Indiana University study (paywall), researchers pinpointed the six primary emotions with a strong influence on viral referral behavior.
These are surprise, fear, sadness, joy, disgust and anger. In many cases, the more disruptive the message, the sooner it is shared. Surprise, the first emotion, is an essential element of all viral marketing campaigns. It works as a foundation alongside other emotional triggers. Here are the researchers recommendations on each emotion:
- Joy. An emotion suited for irrelevant or fun brands and brands who want to revitalize their image. Suitable for products which promise life enhancement.
- Sadness. Suitable when seeking an immediate response to unfortunate events. Consumer reactions may result in short-term commitments instead of long term patronage. Best to balance sadness with messages of hope or change.
- Anger. Best suited for single issue campaigns that require an immediate reaction to perceived injustices experienced by the target market or general environment/society. Anger is a fleeting emotion and is not suitable for campaigns which require long-term action. Also does not work well with complex or subtle issues.
- Fear. An emotion that is a short-term response to a perceived threat. Must be used carefully and sparingly. Likely to receive mixed responses from target market and best accompanied by proposed solutions which solve the fear-causing problem.
- Disgust. Best targeted towards young males. Suitable for brands with a rebellious image. Should only be used intermittently to avoid unnecessary offense. Males are twice more likely to pass on messages involving disgusting humor than females.
The goal to understand the psyche of consumers has always been a goal for marketers who want influence people. Numerous studies have been conducted by academics/experts and they each give us a snapshot of how people within a specific demographic think.
But bear in mind that the few emotions mentioned in the study cannot define the parameters of each individual’s possible actions and hence, should only be taken as rough guidelines.
Human beings are far more likely to communicate ideas and information with others when they are emotionally engaged. Find the key issues that concern your audience and then inculcate them within your marketing plan to get an emotional response. But know that emotions themselves are fleeting and they can be exhausting enough to be abandoned over time.
I think the element of surprise, either pleasant or nasty, is incredibly important. It jolts people out of their habits of perception and can instantly trigger the instinct to share. This is something I’ll like to talk about more in a separate article tomorrow. Stay tuned!
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The Key to Effective Viral Marketing is Emotional Engagement
Ambush Marketing: The Art of Diverting Attention
Ambush marketing is a strategy used by companies to promote their brands at events without paying any sponsorship fees. An example: “Dutch buyers of Heineken beer were given green hats to wear to the recent Euro 2008 football tournament. Anyone who tried to enter a stadium wearing one, however, as many fans did in 2004, was asked to remove it.
The hats were an “ambush marketing” campaign… Heineken’s rival, Carlsberg, was an official sponsor of Euro 2008, paying $21m for the privilege. A few TV close-ups of fans wearing Heineken hats would have cost very little by comparison”
China, the host of the 2008 Olympics, is aware of these tactics and has taken precautions to control ‘all prominent advertising sites in the Chinese capital’ in order to prevent other companies from putting up or buying ads to take advantage of the massive increase in human traffic. They don’t want their official sponsors to be upstaged by other competitors.
Ambush marketing is opportunistic. It’s goal is to take advantage of situations which allow brands/products to get extra exposure at minimal cost. Sometimes that involves going right into the lions den and clashing head on with a competitor who dominates the main message dissemination channels. Sometimes it requires stealth and more guerrilla-like tactics.
What marketers and anyone who wants to promote themselves can learn is the strategy of seeking out people-saturated public spaces (online or offline) and seek to populate that area with your message. Buskers, beggars and poster street teams are all familiar with how to promote their agenda or needs in areas where people frequently pass through.
Contextual relevance is also important. Selling is more natural and persuasive when it flows alongside the momentum generated by the immediate environment and current news/trends.
Just the other day, I went to a rock concert and was waiting in the queue when I noticed a guy from a local radio station standing at the side of the road. As people passed by, he gave them each a high-five while saying out the name of his station.
It was innocuous enough, everyone took it in good taste. After the concert finished, I left the venue with my friends. While walking on the path out, we were stopped by three guys who handed us each a flyer for their band. On it was their band logo as well as their myspace and facebook URLs, along with a link to a free download of some tracks from their latest album.
These people anticipated an opportunity: a rock concert would bring out hordes of music fans, many of which are targeted high-value prospects. The right pitch at the right time/place.
Can Ambush Marketing Actually Work Online?
Image Credit: one nation under CCTV
Let’s talk a little about ambush marketing online. Is it even possible? Maybe. Take the example of sneaky link insertions. Some people carefully monitor the upcoming stories with the most votes on digg.com or other popular social news sites and insert comments with links to their website. When the story hits the frontpage or gradually accumulates visibility, the well placed links can each easily net you upwards of 1,000+ visitors.
This is a tactic that piggybacks on an existing occurrence. To do this effectively, you should constantly push news/events related to your target market and specific keyword-relevant searches on major online communities to a central location, like an RSS reader or dashboard. Monitor this repository of occurrences constantly. Or get someone to keep an eye on it.
After which you need to be prepared to rapidly develop ways to leech the attention from the traffic that’s focused on a specific webpage or occurrence. Sometimes that involves creating specific landing pages that diverge from your website’s original theme/focus.
For instance, to take advantage of the buzz around the iPhone 3G, a website about fitness can create a stand-alone page about iPhone tips/hacks and push it out to not only the popular blogs but every single hobbyist/small-time blogger who has ever expressed an interest in it.
There’s a disconnect between your actual site theme and your specific article/landing page but you are relying on the fact that some of the traffic going over to the specific page will click over to your homepage and end up viewing it. A large amount of non-relevant traffic will eventually allow you to hit a smaller amount of prospects actually interested in your site’s actual focus.
Of course, this isn’t ambush marketing per se, but rather something that builds on the opportunistic mindset which underlies it. The tactical principle is simple: stay in the loop and watch for openings to divert attention towards your brand. A rule of thumb: where people gather online in large numbers, you should be there with a relevant message.
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Ambush Marketing: The Art of Diverting Attention
How to Create Digg-Friendly Content: Cracked.com’s Template
A while ago I wrote about using selective reporting to frame news, grab attention and make your content stand out from the rest of the competition. Now lets looks at creating original content specifically for a social media channel. How do you increase the chances of your article striking a nerve and spreading like wildfire within a specific community?
The answer is simple. I’ve mentioned it before. First of all, you need to start by gathering tactical knowledge on the specific website. Know your audience’s fetishes. Know what they love/hate and know what they talk about. Know what cliques exist within the community. Know what totems, symbols, personalities and ideas are embraced by the general populace.
After knowing that, you can start to create content that is angled towards the specific audience. The mistake that most people make is not having broad appeal. A large general community has many members, each with different interests but a microscopic and overly technical focus on a small topic area may rob your content of the chance of truly going viral.
So what do you do? One method that works is just to use references to heighten content relevance and styling your articles in a catchy format that is easily accessible. What this template looks like will of course, depend on the specific website you are targeting.
Let’s use Digg as an example.
I’m not going to go into all the details on creating digg-friendly content (all that jazz about writing good headlines, using attractive pictures blah blah), instead I’m going to point you to Cracked.com, an example of a website that has perfected the art of writing original content that is attractive to not only Digg but many other channels like forums, blogs and social sites.
A general humor site, Cracked has gradually learned to create a template that works perfectly for a broad range of topics. Their content style does not vary from article to article: they use a more or less fixed template while inserting their topic-of-the-day into it.
What does this mean? That content producers in every conceivable niche/field can create content that will be appealing to a broad audience, just by learning how to use an attention grabbing frame. No more complaints about your site topic being inherently boring or obscure.
Cracked.com publishes a few articles everyday of the week and without fail, almost all of them will get to the frontpage of digg and sometimes, sites like Reddit. It’s a given that they’ll get frontpage glory, the only question is how many hours it’ll take for them to get there.
Like many other popular sites on digg, their success is accumulative: digg users see their content on the frontpage, read it and subscribe to their site via RSS or bookmark. They then visit it when new articles are published and end up digging them. And it goes on and on, untill a sizable number of digg users have become regular readers of their publication.
A lot of their initial success in the beginning was due to the fact that they wrote interesting content which was supported by a few power users who started submitting their stories. Over time, their integration with digg grew deeper and now every morning you’ll see users refreshing the Cracked.com homepage repeatedly just to be the first to submit the new article.
So apart from having supporters early on, how did Cracked.com take off? Mainly through good writing/ideas and the use of a sensationalistic, list-based content template. Instead of analyzing their website myself, I’ll refer you to two key articles they’ve written on the very topic of creating digg-friendly content and getting it to the frontpage.
The first one talks about writing a cracked-style list post and this quote here is most useful:
There are incredibly important questions in the world that need to be answered, which is why people read the The New York Times. Often when writing a list, your goal is to come up with a question that nobody on the face of the earth would ever actually need the answer to–a question that may in fact have never been asked before in the history of the human race.
This might sound easy but think of it like this: Real newspapers give people answers to the questions they’re already asking. What’s going on in Iraq? What’s up with this Bin Laden guy? It’s easy to know what questions to answer when they’re being asked of you.
But nobody’s asking Cracked and me “Who ARE the Top 10 Greatest Character Actors Who Ever Played Ninjas?” or “What DOES Science Have to Say About the Likelihood of a Zombie Apocalypse?” Journalists have it easy.
They even developed a tongue-in-cheek popularity equation for their list posts:
The” + (Number) + “Most” + (Over the top adjective) + (Subject) + Of All Time (Synonyms like “in History” or “Ever” will also be accepted) = Popularity
The second article (published today) talks about the 7 cheats for hitting the digg frontpage. This is more of a satirical piece and has only two points which are useful. The first is to use to talk about and reference Digg. I’ve talked about this before. The other point is to play to the crowd’s interests. Here’s an exaggerated mockup of a story that does that:
Note how the title crams in some of the big issues that Digg users care about.
Many people have written about content creation for social media, site optimization and ways to leverage digg. The hundreds of guides or tutorials out there are great but you’ll learn the fastest by observing the best. Apart from regularly watching what goes popular on various social channels, sites like Cracked.com can help you learn how to make even a small topical focus attractive to a general audience. And that’s what you need to reach more people online.
By the way, you might want to add me as a friend on Digg.
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How to Create Digg-Friendly Content: Cracked.com’s Template
How to Say Nothing in 500 Words (A Lesson on Writing)
The ability to write well is very useful for our personal and professional lives. It helps students, business people, politicians, writers, bloggers, marketers and everyone who has ever needed to arrange words together to convey ideas or opinions. The written word has become an essential means of social communication: mastery of it helps you to enthrall and persuade an audience that would look upon you favorably in return.
It goes without saying that learning how to create compelling content is a part of one’s success as an online publisher. Reading widely and deeply while consistently honing your writing skills helps a great deal in bettering your prose. Sometimes, it doesn’t hurt to read a few stylebooks/essays on writing by professional teachers or authors.
One of these essays on writing is Paul McHenry Roberts’s How to Say Nothing in Five Hundred Words, a brilliantly humorous introduction on writing college compositions. I discovered this essay today and read though easily in one sitting, possibly because it was so well-written and entertaining. It’s a perfect example of the writing techniques listed within.
Here’s a quick summary of the 9 main points mentioned. I’ve extracted some of the key paragraphs from the text but be sure to read the full essay because these points are elaborated in much greater detail with some excellent examples.
- Avoid the obvious content.“Say the assignment is college football. Say that you’ve decided to be against it. Begin by putting down the arguments that come to your mind. Now when you write your paper, make sure that you don’ t use any of the material on this list. If these are the points that leap to your mind, they will leap to everyone else’s too. Be against college football for some reason or reasons of your own. If they are keen and perceptive ones, that’s splendid. But even if they are trivial or foolish or indefensible, you are still ahead so long as they are not everybody else’s reasons too.”
- Take the less usual side. “One rather simple way of getting into your paper is to take the side of the argument that most of the citizens will want to avoid. They are intellectual exercises, and it is legitimate to argue now one way and now another, as debaters do in similar circumstances. Always take the that looks to you hardest, least defensible. It will almost always turn out to be easier to write interestingly on that side.”
- Slip out of abstraction. “Look at the work of any professional writer and notice how constantly he is moving from the generality, the abstract statement, to the concrete example, the facts and figures, the illustrations. For most the soundest advice is to be seeking always for the picture, to be always turning general remarks into seeable examples. Don’t say, “Sororities teach girls the social graces.” Say, “Sorority life teaches a girl how to carry on a conversation while pouring tea, without sloshing the tea into the saucer.”
- Get rid of obvious padding. “Instead of stuffing your sentences with straw, you must try steadily to get rid of the padding, to make your sentences lean and tough… You dig up more real content. Instead of taking a couple of obvious points off the surface of the topic and then circling warily around them for six paragraphs, you work in and explore, figure out the details. You illustrate.”
- Call a fool a fool. “If he was a fool, call him a fool. Hedging the thing about with “in-my-opinion’s” and “it-seems-to-me’s” and “as-I-see-it’s” and “at-least-from-my-point-of-view’s” gains you nothing. Delete these phrases whenever they creep into your paper. Decide what you want to say and say it as vigorously as possible, without apology and in plain words. Writing in the modern world, you cannot altogether avoid modern jargon. But you can do much if you will mount guard against those roundabout phrases, those echoing polysyllables that tend to slip into your writing to rob it of its crispness and force.”
- Beware of Pat Expressions. “Other things being equal, avoid phrases like “other things being equal.” Those sentences that come to you whole, or in two or three doughy lumps, are sure to be bad sentences. They are no creation of yours but pieces of common thought floating in the community soup… No writer avoids them altogether, but good writers avoid them more often than poor writers.”
- Colorful Words. “Some words are what we call “colorful.” By this we mean that they are calculated to produce a picture or induce an emotion. They are dressy instead of plain, specific instead of general, loud instead of soft. Thus, in place of “Her heart beat,” we may write, “her heart pounded, throbbed, fluttered, danced.” Instead of “He sat in his chair,” we may say, “he lounged, sprawled, coiled.”
- Colored Words.. “When we hear a word, we hear with it an echo of all the situations in which we have heard it before. The word mother, for example, has, for most people, agreeable associations. When you hear mother you probably think of home, safety, love, food, and various other pleasant things..The question of whether to use loaded words or not depends on what is being written.”
- Colorless Words. “A pet example is nice, a word we would find it hard to dispense with in casual conversation but which is no longer capable of adding much to a description. Colorless words are those of such general meaning that in a particular sentence they mean nothing…Slang adjectives like cool (”That’s real cool”) tend to explode all over the language. They are applied to everything, lose their original force, and quickly die.”
Learning how to create content using concrete, lean, colorful and vivid prose with unique perspectives will help you to get more readers, customers and supporters. But bear in mind that its not just about writing in a fancy way to entertain. It’s also a conscientious way of differentiating yourself from thousands of similar writers/thinkers in the same field.
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How to Say Nothing in 500 Words (A Lesson on Writing)
How to Analyze and Improve the ‘Bounce Rate’ for Your Website
Getting users engaged with your content can result with a sale, subscription, bookmark and return visit. One of best ways to increase reader engagement is to make sure that your site architecture interlinks related content and displays them in a way which encourages the user to click around. If the first article doesn’t result in a subscription, the second might.
A term commonly used to measure visitor engagement is the bounce rate, which is the percentage of initial visitors who leaves your site after arriving at the entry page. These are visitors who ‘bounce away’ after arriving without viewing other pages on your site. You can easily find your site’s bounce rate by using stats tools like Google Analytics.
A low bounce rate means that visitors are exploring your website in greater detail. This can be inferred to mean that they are more engaged with your content. In a recent article, Jakob Nielsen suggested that the bounce rate remains an important metric.
Given growing bounce rates, we must stop using “unique visitors” as a metric for site success. Site tourists who leave a site immediately ratchet up the unique visitor count, but don’t contribute long-term value. On the contrary, bouncers should be considered a negative statistic: the site failed to engage them enough to entice even a second pageview.
Nielsen suggested that the bounce rate must be analyzed separately for four main different sources of visitors: low-value referrers, direct links from other sites, search engine traffic and loyal users. The reason for this is simple: visitors relate to your website differently, depending on their needs. The originating source indicates observable behavior patterns.
A loyal user might visit your site via a feed reader and exit after reading a new article because he/she is up to date with your archives. A user with a desire for very specific knowledge will visit your site through a search engine and can be easily tempted to click around. A casual visitor might hit one of your pages while browsing through social channels like StumbleUpon.
The point to note is that bounce rates will vary depending on the source and hence, they should be analyzed in comparison to previous sets of similar data and not across different sources. For example, the performance of search engine referrals should be measured against previous bounce rates and not against another visitor source like Digg.
Measuring Your Bounce Rate Against Overall Site Goals
However, comparing the historical bounce rates across different visitor sources will show the value of the traffic you’re receiving. Assuming that low bounce rates result in purchases, subscriptions or return visits, you can find the best performing traffic source. The important thing is to ultimately plot the bounce rates for each source against your overall site goal.
Apart from the referrer source, several other issues influence variations in bounce rates. For example, the purpose of your website, its current design and the goal of the specific entry page. It’s difficult to determine a standard bounce rate to use as a yardstick, although analytics expert Avinash Kaushik does offer some suggestions in an excellent article:
Bounce rate is a metric you’ll easily find in all web analytics tools… It won’t have all the answers for you, but it will help you focus very quickly on what’s important, show where you are wasting money and what content on your site needs revisiting. As a benchmark from my own personal experience over the years it is hard to get a bounce rate under 20%. Anything over 35% is a cause for concern and anything above 50% is worrying.
Understanding that blogs are a little different from other static sites, Avinash suggests that a 50% bounce rate for blogs is somewhat normal and a 75% rate would be a cause for concern.
Yardsticks can be useful but as I’ve mentioned, its important to not just observe bounce rate alone but its movement and impact on a specific overall goal like conversion ratios. As you are unable to ascertain the bounce rates of your competitors or peers, you need to focus more on the historical performance of your own site and study trends to discern visitor patterns.
Are lower bounce rates resulting in more purchases or subscriptions? Which type of visitors often result in high bounce rates and are there ways to change that by manipulating on-the-page elements such as link placement? What are your high-traffic pages and how can bounce visitors from it to other conversion-friendly pages on your site?
Improving Your Bounce Rate and Getting More Page Views
There is much to write on this topic. Each website has different goals or requirements so I’ll not delve too much into details but talk about overall strategies. First of all, the bounce rate is very much influenced by what is visible to the visitor. They are much more likely to click to another page when they are presented with very relevant links, call-to-actions or information.
It’s all about optimizing webpages and connecting them into a unity which adds value for both the loyal reader and the visitor who’s coming in blind from a referral site or search engine. Assume that your visitor knows nothing about your site. Assume that they want more information. Make navigation points easy to access, position links around content.
Nielsen suggests that a 2-step program to lower your bounce rates:
- Test your site with a group of users. Ask them to enter your site from specific pages. Get feedback based on their experiences. This will give you ways to improve.
- Expose next steps. Give visitors actions to take if they are interested in the current page. Add links to more information at the bottom of the copy or within content.
There are many ways to orient your visitors and the most important principle is to make the links highly visible and relevant to the current page. Let’s look at the BBC, a news site which I’ve always admired for their excellent interlinking practices. Here are screen-shots of individual story pages. Take note of the well positioned links on the sidebar:
For publishers, the BBC content model shows how pages can be well integrated into a cohesive unit, thus encouraging users to bounce from the entry page to another. From the examples, you’ll see that content producers can include many additional links:
- Links to feature articles with in-depth analysis
- Links to other news articles on the same topic
- Links to a dedicated reference page dealing with only the specific topic
- Links to a comment section/forum to invite participation by readers
- Links to a Back story or general background information
- Links to a multi-media presentation (audio/video)
You can do the same for other static sites that aren’t publications. Just keep in mind that the main goal is to anticipate user interest and needs by creating web pages which continue to funnel them from the original entry page to other parts of your site.
To best achieve this, you should regularly analyze your bounce rate, while studying your competitors and testing your site with a group of users. After amassing data, implement changes to your site and see if the bounce rate improves. Also, determine how it affects your goals. Finally, make changes if necessary.
If you’ve not paid any attention to your bounce rate before, try starting today. It might help you to dramatically improve your website.
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How to Analyze and Improve the ‘Bounce Rate’ for Your Website
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