In the News
View all news articles >>PR Reporter - March 5, 2001
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Making Your Message Contagious; Viral Marketing Is An Inexpensive Way to Engage Publics
It works like a virus spreading from person to person in a school or office. Properly strategized & targeted, & showing a great deal of creativity, Internet communication can be multifaceted & interactive, engaging receivers in the process as active participants.
- "Viral marketing" capitalizes on this characteristic by giving target publics more than just a message: providing the incentive to pass it on
- It utilizes the principles of "People want to be served, not sold; involved, not told" (prr 4/6/98)
- "Where direct marketing uses broadcast media & direct mail with the hope of improving percentages (of responses or sales), viral marketing looks to improve multiples (pass alongs)"
- "It embeds important messages in something interesting that people will want to pass on. The Internet enables them to multiply."
e-tractions put together the "Whack-a-Flack" campaign to attract press coverage and expand the company's database. Viral mktg often has such multiple goals. "We took advantage of the interesting dynamic between pr people & journalists" - i.e., the annoyance factor. Journalists are often irritated by publicists, with their endless releases, phone calls, e-mails, etc.
Whack-a-Flack is an interactive game that allows journalists to vent frustrations by shooting paper airplanes at a variety of "pr types" (such as "Lance" who lacks good hygiene & whose favorite quote is "dude!"). Players can 1) choose from a list of well-known firms (Edelman, Hill and Knowlton, Brodeur Porter Novelli, to name a few), 2) state reasons for their irritation - "too pushy," "clueless," "lacking strategy," "rude," etc. - 3) then whack away.
The player has the option to leave an e-mail address & permission to receive updates from e-tractions. [Never mind its attack on pr! Maybe the catharsis helped]
Gauthier reports Whack-a-Flack has been a rousing success. e-tractions sent out 150 e-mails to journalists with links to the Whack-a-Flack site. The address received over 60,000 visitors, plus 3,000 "permissioned contacts." "We got press from the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal & about 2 dozen magazines. Plus it really allowed us to expand our database.
- He says cost of the campaign was "essentially zero"
Viral Marketing of a Product
To translate concept to product marketing, e-tractions just finished a campaign for The History Channel, which wanted to get the word out to teachers that its programming is an educational tool. "They were trying to build a database of history teachers. We created a viral marketing campaign based on one of their shows called "Frontier Homes." e-tractions developed a site where a person can virtually visit a frontier home & test his or her knowledge about log cabins, colonial houses, etc.
- A call to action is key. While it's important to allow people to have fun, it's essential to include an initiative - whether it's collecting data, routing people to your site, or, as in the case of The History Channel, encouraging people to download free material (a teaching guide)