A New Generation Marketer

It is not content itself that is inherently viral, it is the people who are powering the social sharing of the content that allow it to become viral. As content creators, it is our job to create compelling information that is worthy of being shared on social networks to then become viral.

In the attention economy today, we don’t find information, it finds us. Those who are great at SEO and understand how users search can tailor their messages to us so we naturally find it either in search engine queries or through social media searches. If they target the SEO to the right users and they find the information relevant and interesting, it has a higher likelihood of becoming virally spread throughout the Internet world.

Many times people will ask their advertising or marketing agencies to create a ‘viral’ video or ‘viral’ blog post. However, you cannot just create something and call it viral, hoping it actually becomes viral. It is quite the opposite. You must not only create the content that is likely to spread, but make it easy for the right audience to find it and share it among their social graph.

If you are interacting on social networks to try to spread your ideas, then you should have at least a few good personal contacts on those sites. When you know someone personally, you are more likely to favor them and talk favorably about them to others. You can use this to your advantage by starting to share your content with people you know and they can begin the viral spread of the content.

Dan Zarella, a social media scientist, has defined several ways ideas can become contagious. In his research, Zarella has found that for ideas to spread, they must be novel. People will not keep sharing content that has been covered by hundreds of other sources and people before you. Find topics that are fresh, interesting, and even controversial since they will be new and interesting to your target audience.

While most content can go viral just by people liking it, you can also reward those that share. As Brian Solis pointed out in a recent blog post, social influence has a cascading effect. If you reward the people who share your ideas, they will feel encouraged to keep sharing. This will also motivate them to keep finding great, new information to share with their networks.

If a person has a plethora of followers or readers who are a significant part of your market and you can get them to pass along your content to them, they need to be rewarded. Your goal in viral marketing is to find those key influencers who know other key influencers and followers and get them to spread your word. Essentially, and in the words of Solis, “ideas are worthy of sharing, when there is incentive to do so.”

When we think of viral marketing today, the idea of it has changed. It is not about creating content that is deemed naturally viral, it is targeting great information to those who will be most interested in it and are social sharers. This is the same concept for any type of marketing, you must create targeted messages to the attentive market. As Solis stated in his post Redefining Viral Marketing, “Designing social objects based on the psychographics rather than demographics of those you wish to reach and inspire, proves critical in the viability of engendering personal connections – connections worthy of sharing.”