Is viral dead?

No way, but there are new requirements for running a successful campaign.

Web positioning is a strategy for placement of viral marketing material in front of large online audiences is now a necessary part of the viral marketing campaign. This is particularly important with corporate material which is often not risky enough to create true viral appeal. That’s not to say its not enjoyed and doesn’t raise interest and awareness in the brand – its just that nowadays most content sent from inbox to inbox – that what we could call ‘organic’ viral – is often gratuitous or bizarre beyond the stomach of yer average marketing manager. You try selling in the VW suicide Bomber concept to their marketing team and see how far you get.

There’s also the decline in pass along rates for any material anyhow due to a couple of factors:

1. There’s more viral material than ever before so people are more discerning. Most of us have also seen most concepts in some form anyhow and if you’ve seen a derivation and passed it along – you are less likely to do it again.

2. Corporate firewalls have made it increasingly difficult for inbox content – video, images etc to hit their target.

3. People are more concerned with the idea of spamming friends with lots of viral content. We all get too much email anyway.

4. Searchable viral content has never been easier and there are now well known and well used viral content hubs online supplying good material all in once place.

It’s the latter that present a great opportunity for viral marketers. Now in any viral marketing campaign there should be a budget for web positioning. And it should not be a budgetary or strategic afterthought. Planning a successful placement campaign is campaign in itself.

The advantages are measurable. Unlike inbox pass alongs which are really hard to estimate, webstats can provide detail on views and downloads. You can also host the content yourself if you like and track traffic from the sites to the clip. A web positioning timeline can help you see which sites worked best by positioning content at different times in the campaign lifecycle.

We’ve not run any of our viral campaigns without a web positioning strategy for over 3 years and its brought measurable pairs of eyeballs for each one.

And we don’t have to create the content to offer a strategy for audience building. The Nokia N90 wedding speech, seen here on the Guardian’s top 10 most downloaded virals of last year is one campaign we are particularly pleased with (creative courtesy of Swedish agency FarFar).

Brought into the world on Wednesday, March 1st, 2006 and filed under Uncategorized.