Doesn’t Viral Marketing sound exciting… and cheap? How can you not want to try a Viral Marketing campaign? If it works for a cool Indie band, maybe it will work for your company?
While reading the book about viral marketing, “And Then There’s This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture” by Bill Wasik, I realized that viral marketing, in and of itself, will not predictably achieve success. It’s always exciting to hear about the one time it worked, but that’s not how you build a marketing plan.
In fact, in Wasik’s chapter on the viral marketing of indie-rock bands, I saw the predictability of non-success. He even has a chart showing the progression of how the blog/press reacts to an indie band. The pattern begins when a band is lucky enough to do something thar gets a blogger interested enough to write about them. Then, more bloggers write about how “this is the next band to watch.” They write some things that are really complimentary (in a qualified manner), and people start to buy the band’s songs on iTunes. Next, a few newspaper columnists write about how the “Blogosphere” is discovering this band. More sales, and people start going to see the band. Then a major newspaper reviewer will typically say he/she doesn’t know what all the fuss is about–this is just a good band, not great.
And then the tide turns. The number of blog mentions fall quickly to almost nothing. The band wonders what happened. According to Wasik, the whole process takes about six months.
Some smart bands (and this actually happens) then change their names, put out a new release, and start all over again.
The bands and artists that have a longer career have to have a complete marketing plan. They need a plan that includes an actual budget for PR, a good MySpace page, and hopefully a media company behind them to run ads. They can’t just hope that good luck and superior talent will get them to the top of the charts.
What I learned is there is no magic bullet, other than careful planning and an appropriate budget that can get the job done. No single tool is the answer. The answer for us at Placemaking Group is to use the proper set of tools to get the job completed successfully.
