Viral Marketing Outcomes

February 26, 2009 at 1:38 pm | Posted in Advertising, Changes, Culture, Innovation, Marketing, Marketing 2.0, Media 2.0 | 3 Comments

In the process of examining the outcomes there are two opposing sides who says viral marketing cannot be controlled and those that disagrees. First group who disagree think that viral marketing can be controlled, the others say no. 

According Joseph Carrabis,

“The completely controllable part of viral marketing is based on mathematics and deals with the following questions:”

• How many individuals does the campaign need to start with (seed)? 
• How fast will the campaign spread (propagation factor)? 
• How will the campaign spread (vectors)? 
• How large a group is required to sustain the propagation (viral burden)? 
• What is the campaign’s goal (maintenance factor)? 
• How large a group is required to sustain the campaign once the goal is achieved (threshold point)? 
• At what point is the campaign too successful (saturation point)?

He also developed his own theory the Meskauskas-Carrabis Effect or MCE as a phenomenon wherein Jim Meskauskas four necessary elements for viral marketing campaign and his trust and fair-exchange concept of B2C could be predictable and probabilistic if the right tools to determine audience-to-message match and related factors are used.

The four elements by Jim are:

• Entertainment
• Utility 
• Palpable Reward
• Uniqueness

If the viral marketing is controllable, marketers have to do the following:

• Start in the end (outcomes/goals) and work it back to the beginning.
• Have precise descriptions of all the situations.
• Look back from the goal

In the viral marketing there are 3 main roles: 

• Companies as advertisers whose role in distribution of their product, put on the first line the importance of gaining brand awareness. 
• Developers as publishers who create the medium of advertisements for the advertisers.
• Ordinary people as consumers who is emotionally affected by the mediums so they spread the word or the medium used via emails, videos, blogs, podcast.

According to the BIGresearch Simultaneous Media Survey, the typical blogger (ordinary people) is:

• Male (53.7%)
• Average age of 37
• Slightly lower than average income ($55,819 vs. $56,811)
• Better than average education (14.3 years of education vs. 14.2)
• Ethnically (69,70% caucasian, 20% hispanic, 12,20% african american, 3,70% asian)

Make your message reachable by the targeted audience…