Community Marketing vs Viral Marketing
At my previous role, I ran a Community Marketing program, it was designed for the long term communication between customers/prospects/marketplace and our employees. I’ve met many a marketer who has been bitten by the ‘viral video’ bug and thinks that’s real marketing. Someone of them have spent more money than my salary from a Hollywood film artists to produce films, sometimes even hiring celebrities.
These graphs show long term visitation to a website, you can see the difference between creating a Community Marketing program vs a flash in the pan Viral Marketing effort that will be like the ‘pet rock’ of the 80s.
Many marketers want to ‘make their mark’ on the world and create such a viral video but let’s be honest the successful ones are few and far in between. I would be so bold to suggest that the best viral videos are rarely corporate created either, so let’s stop trying to do something unattainable.
Think long term, build out tools and programs that let product teams have ongoing dialogues with real customers and prospects to build better products.
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Hey Jeremiah,
Although in the past it was just good enough to build out tools and let the customers engage in conversation. I’ve noticed that since these tools are now popping up a lot more, companies must find ways on how to integrate it with their overall corporate strategy. They must somehow find a way for these tools to “seamless” integrate with their current corporate website/strategy. Otherwise, customers may become reluctant to participate. And perhaps, this is the most difficult part. It’s making sure your customer feels comfortable enough to continue their web experience and engage in real dialogue, without feeling pushed. Yet, at the same time, the medium to get to these tools must indirectly say “Come over…we have something to offer you!”
-Chris
While viral videos can indeed work, I hope that most business realize that most videos don’t go viral. Many of the viral videos that have been a success are actually ones generated by individuals & not corporations.
Community Marketing is a daily thing:)
Thomas Gieselmann of BV Capital was the first to make this clear to me.
If you permanently increase the rate of your service’s usage (community marketing), then you will enjoy the effects of long-term compound interest. Let’s say you change your growth rate from 5% to 10% monthly and you currently have 100,000 members.
Community marketing spread is definitely ‘compound’ so while after 12 months at 5% you’d have 179,585 members, after 12 months of 10% growth you’d have 313,842 members.
So instead of trying to do a one-time thing that will spike you even 100,000 one time visitors. Change the core virality up front and it will pay off by the year’s end.
Of course that is easier said then done, but increasing community marketing, over the course of 24 or 36 or 48 months will blow away any series of virality campaigns.
Jeremiah, good post, I think this is the difference between following a sales model and marketing model. Sales are important, but building long term relationships can lower your cost of acquiring new sales, especially if your community starts to refer you.
[…] The recent admission by Microsoft’s marketing group that the tremendous community reaction to their “Mad World” TV spot for the game Gears of War was not an intended side effect of the ad campaign got me thinking about what Jeremiah Owyang wrote a couple of months ago about community vs. viral marketing. […]