Viral marketing of digital products using social media - MBA Dissertation

Kapil Gupta

Viral marketing of
digital products using
social media

Dissertation presented for the Degree of Masters of Business
Administration at the University of Edinburgh Business School, May 2011

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my supervisor, Tony Kinder, for all of the help and guidance he has
given me over the course of the project, from the initial idea through the research and
writing stages through to the conclusion. It would have been impossible to complete this
project without his assistance.

I would also like to thank all of the interviewees, whose experiences and insights were
invaluable in writing this report:

Rachel Armitage
Jenny Herbison
Andrew Burnett
Colin Gilchrist
Tera Dargavel

I would also like to thank all my friends and colleagues who tolerated me while I incessantly
talked about viral marketing and who sometimes even helped me brainstorm some ideas.

Warm thanks to all of you,

Kapil Gupta
Edinburgh, May 2011

MBA Dissertation Page 1

Abstract
Improvements in hardware and software technologies like high speed internet, cloud
computing, smaller and faster chips, have made social networking and mobile devices
ubiquitous, which has in turn created a huge opportunity in digital products and services
market. Marketers, in trying to use traditional word-of-mouth marketing concepts online for
- aka viral marketing – for their digital products are realising that there is the potential of
exponential growth that can be achieved very quickly and very cheaply when compared to
using more traditional marketing channels. This report attempts to explore how marketers
could use viral marketing to market their digital products and realise this potentially
exponential growth.

In answering this question, this report draws on the results of primary and secondary
research, including four interviews conducted in March and April 2011 with professionals
from organisations dealing in digital products and social media marketing. Among the topics
covered in these interviews were identifying who can use viral marketing, strategic issues
surrounding viral marketing, specific characteristics that a products needs to have to be
considered for viral marketing, creating and executing a viral marketing campaign, and how
to make a viral marketing campaign sustainable.

The research showed that all aspects of an organisation need to come together and work in
tandem to potentially achieve an exponential growth using a viral marketing campaign -
from defining an overall business and marketing strategy, looking at company’s capabilities,
putting crisis management in place, developing the right product which is social spread
friendly, finding the right influencers in the relevant market channels, seeding these
influencers, monitoring the campaign, engaging with customers as they provide positive and
negative feedback, and all this while building momentum to a point where campaign
potentially goes viral.

Research also shows the marketers need to be aware of the negative aspects of viral
marketing, as it could be catastrophic to a brand.


Drawing on these findings, the report then presents the five areas that marketers should
consider while using viral marketing to market digital products:

 Overall business and marketing strategy

 Human and system capabilities

 Finding the right Influencers

 Designing and developing a brilliant product

 Creating and managing a campaign

 Sustainability of viral marketing campaign


Table of Contents
Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................................................... 1
Abstract .............................................................................................................................................................. 2
1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................................ 6
1.1 Digital products ............................................................................................................................. 7
1.2 Social media and viral marketing ........................................................................................... 8
1.3 Viral marketing of digital products using social media ................................................. 9
2. Literature Review................................................................................................................................ 10
2.1 What is Social Media?................................................................................................................ 10
2.2 Social media classification ...................................................................................................... 11
2.3 What does Social Media means for marketers? .............................................................. 12
2.4 What is Viral Marketing? ......................................................................................................... 13
2.5 Advantages / Disadvantages of VM. .................................................................................... 14
2.6 Identifying the target audience for a viral marketing campaign. ............................ 15
2.7 Creating and executing a VM campaign - main characteristics. ............................... 17
2.8 Measuring effectiveness of a VM Campaign ..................................................................... 19
2.9 How to make a Viral Marketing campaign sustainable? ............................................. 20
2.10 Summary.................................................................................................................................... 20
3. Methodology.......................................................................................................................................... 22
3.1 Research approach..................................................................................................................... 22
3.2 Data collection methods .......................................................................................................... 23
3.3 Interview subjects ...................................................................................................................... 24
3.4 Secondary sources ..................................................................................................................... 25
3.5 Data analysis................................................................................................................................. 26
3.6 Research limitations .................................................................................................................. 26
3.7 Ethical considerations .............................................................................................................. 27
4. Empirical Material .............................................................................................................................. 28
4.1 Importance of strategy ............................................................................................................. 28
4.2 Important factors for viral messages .................................................................................. 30
4.3 Importance of influencers ....................................................................................................... 32
4.4 Executing a campaign ............................................................................................................... 35
4.5 Sustainability of a VM campaign ........................................................................................... 37
5. Analysis ................................................................................................................................................... 40
5.1 Viral Marketing ............................................................................................................................ 41
5.2 Strategy........................................................................................................................................... 42
5.3 Capabilities.................................................................................................................................... 43
5.4 Product ........................................................................................................................................... 44
5.5 Influencers .................................................................................................................................... 44
5.6 Creating a campaign .................................................................................................................. 45
5.7 Campaign management............................................................................................................ 46
5.8 Sustainability................................................................................................................................ 48
5.9 Summary ........................................................................................................................................ 48
6. Conclusion .............................................................................................................................................. 54
6.1 Summary of results .................................................................................................................... 54
6.2 Personal reflections ................................................................................................................... 56
6.3 Contribution to existing knowledge .................................................................................... 57

6.4 Business lessons.......................................................................................................................... 57
6.5 Further research ......................................................................................................................... 58
Bibliography................................................................................................................................................... 59
Appendix A ..................................................................................................................................................... 66
Appendix B ..................................................................................................................................................... 72
Appendix C ...................................................................................................................................................... 81
Appendix D ..................................................................................................................................................... 89
Appendix E...................................................................................................................................................... 93
Appendix F ...................................................................................................................................................... 94


1. Introduction
There is an explosion happening in the digital world, and Social Media is responsible for it.
Not a day goes by without hearing something new about how hundreds of millions of
people are engaging in social media. Here are some examples:

 Facebook (Mashable 2010) (Mashable 2011)

o has almost 600m users.

o 750 million photos were uploaded on Facebook on the new years (2010-
11) weekend.

o is valued at $75 billion.

 YouTube (OnlineSchools 2010)

o streamed more than 700 billion videos in 2010

o 25 hours of content of was uploaded every minute in 2010

 Twitter

o has 175 million registered users

o 100 million tweets daily.

Venture Capitalists and other investors are flogging to invest in new and innovative social
media companies and device manufacturers are continuously coming up with new and
sophisticated devices to provide a platform for people to engage in social media while on
the move.


The recent technological advancements - in mobile devices, multi-touch screens, cloud
computing, and the advancements in the way we interact with the devices – has allowed the
companies to deliver content and services in very easy, fast and interactive ways.

With more and more people using social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, YouTube
etc., the way these products are being marketed is changing as well. For example, using viral
marketing, KIK - a cross platform mobile phone application was downloaded 1 million times
in just 15 days after its launch (KIK 2010). In another example, Viber was able to achieve 1
million downloads in just 5 days (Appchronicles 2010). It has since amassed 10 million
(Techcrunch 2011) downloads.

This paper will look at how companies developing digital products could use social media to
develop and execute a viral marketing campaign.

1.1 Digital products

In 2002, Hui et al (Hui & Chau 2002) classified Digital products into three categories:

 Tools and Utilities that assist user to accomplish specific goals or tasks

 Content based products whose value lies in the information content

 Online services that provide access to useful resources like server connections as
well as online utilities that assist users in accomplishing specific tasks

Since then, with the rise and adaptation of Web 2.0 technologies, digital products and
services have seen an explosion - both in terms of the numbers of products and services,
and the number of consumers using them i.e. mobile platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Blogs,
YouTube, LinkedIn etc.), mobile applications (>300,000 apps on Apple AppStore with 10
billion downloads), Cloud computing etc.

This market is set to grow exponentially over the coming 5-10 years (Venturebeat 2010).
Below are some data that support this trend:


 More and more mobile devices are being developed. For example -Motorola Xoom
tablet, HP TouchPad etc.

 The vast majority of developing world yet to adopt smart phones (India hasn’t even
start deploying 3G infrastructure yet)

 New business and revenue models are continuously emerging (Mobile Ad market
was worth $877 million in the US alone and is predicted to rise to $3bn by 2013 (Kim
2010) )

 The smart phone penetration is growing rapidly (Alarcon 2009) (Blandford 2010)

This change is happening at a fast pace (Perez 2010) and there is little written about the
particular challenges in marketing the digital products, hence the reason to look at Digital
products specifically in this paper.

1.2 Social media and viral marketing

Internet has now become a virtual social world where we meet our friends and family, make
new friends, engage in conversation about work-life experience – including buying products
and services and the resulting experiences – engage in marketplace and listen to people we
trust when making buying decisions.

When it comes to making decisions, people have always been influenced by their peers,
group leaders and other influential people in society whose opinion they value. Marketers
have long used Word of Mouth (WOM) marketing to influence the buying decisions in the
physical world. With the advent of Social Media, this conversation has gone online, and has
become global as there are no geographical barriers when it comes to the internet. There
are now hundreds of millions (Bloch 2010) of people using Social Media making
conversations, posting their feelings and opinions, and influencing others with their ideas
and experiences. WOM marketing in this virtual world has a new name, called Viral
Marketing. However, virtual nature of this social conversation presents unique challenges to
viral marketing.

From an organisation’s point of view, the key challenge is to assess whether it has the
bandwidth to deal with a sudden rush of people wanting to buy its products i.e. can it fulfil
every request? Can it provide a positive customer experience to all its customers? It also
needs to ensure that all its ducks are in a row within the organisation to deal with the
sudden influx. For example, there is no point marketing department using viral marketing if
the IT department cannot deal with a sudden rise in number of downloads.

From the marketers point of view, the key challenges are - How do you find who to target
among the vast number of people interacting online, especially the ones who would both
like your product and influence significant number of others to buy them? What do you do
to grab their attention and engage with them? How do you correctly assess people’s
emotions about the products and services from the text they use online? How do you
measure whether marketing campaign is working and adding to the bottom line? And
finally, how do you make it sustainable?

1.3 Viral marketing of digital products using social media

In order to help improve the overall understanding of viral marketing of digital products
using social media, this paper will attempt to answer the following research question:

 How is viral marketing of digital products different from that of viral messages (e.g.
YouTube videos)?

 What are the steps an organisation needs to take while considering, designing and
executing a viral marketing campaign using social media

 Once a viral marketing campaign is successful, what should an organisation do to
sustain the customer’s interest?


2. Literature Review

2.1 What is Social Media?

Social Media is the commonly known term for the Web2.0 technologies that enable the
Internet users to generate and exchange content (Kaplan & Haenlein 2010) through desktop
and mobile devices.

With the increase in consumption of the mass media and internet, the decline of community
activity has been one of the dominant social trends of recent decades across the world’s
advanced economies (Putnam 2000). American social scientist Robert Putnam wrote about
this trend, but also saw the potential of revival of these communities through internet
(Putnam 2000). The Cluetrain Manifesto (Levine 2009), the 1999 internet marketing book
also made a similar point in that it claimed people were drawn to the internet because of
“the promise of voice and thus of authentic self (Levine 2009).” Social media’s popularity
(Mashable 2011) over the last few years seems to provide confirmation to this as people
continue to reach out to connect to other human beings and in the process accept the
technological advancements that are thrown at them.

The term Social Media was coined around 2004 with the launch of social networking
websites like MySpace (2003) and Facebook (2004); however the concept of social
networking can be traced back to almost 30 years ago when the first email was sent
between two computers. Advancements in technologies like Internet, network
infrastructure, Web 2.0, mobile devices etc. have since empowered every internet user to
create their own content - be it video, blog, opinions etc. - and share between their online
social networks. Social Media allows people to stay connected with many more people –
friends, families, business associates etc. - even across multiple continents, than was
possible in the past.

From a business point of view, social media is becoming an important platform to
understand the market needs, study competition, and leverage the platforms to launch and
market products and services and to maintain customer relationships. Marketers are


actively listening into the conversation on the social networks and analysing the impact of
their brands. In December 2010, the editorial in the Harvard Business Review suggested:

“Companies have traditionally spent up to 90% of their marketing
budget on advertising and retail promotions. Yet the biggest influence
in purchasing decision is often other people’s recommendations”

According to Brian Dunn, CEO of Best Buy, “Social Media are where the national
conversation is taking place today and either you are part of that conversation or you are
not” (Dunn 2010).

Social Media Marketing is set to become an integral part of every company’s integrated
marketing mix in the coming months and years.

2.2 Social media classification

In order to find the right customers for targeting a marketing campaign - for a company,
product, or brand - or to look for customers, especially the opinion leaders in social
networks talking about specific brand, marketers need to understand which social media
platforms to focus on. According to Kaplan et al (Kaplan & Haenlein 2010), there are six
different types of Social Media: collaborative projects, blogs and microblogs, content
communities, social networking sites, virtual game worlds, and virtual communities.

Further to this, Bernoff (Bernoff 2010) classify the types of social media users as – creators,
critics, collectors, joiners, spectators and inactives. It is important for marketers to
understand that social network users quite often use multiple platforms while
communicating. For example, a user might post a video on YouTube and share its links and
opinions through Twitter, Facebook etc.

These classifications are important for marketers in that they not only need to target the
social networks or the social media users that are relevant to their business, but also choose
the right management and monitoring tools that link to specific social network datasets.
However, marketers need to be wary of the fact that social media is evolving rapidly and

new types of networks are quite likely to emerge in the future and they need to keep
themselves abreast on this area.

Failure to recognise the relevant networks or the type of users on social networks could end
up in marketers spending a lot or time of effort with very little in the way of the results. This
is quite a common practice as marketers that do not know understand social media tend to
shoot in the dark and very often fail to get the desired result for themselves and their
organisations.

2.3 What does Social Media means for marketers?

Gerzema and Lebar (Gerzema & Edward 2008) argue in their book The Brand Bubble that
since consumers trust each other more than they trust marketing information, social media
has altered the trust equation for brands by allowing the customers to create and exchange
their own contents. This means the customers can freely exchange positive and negative
perceptions about a brand in a connected world where these perceptions can spread like a
wild fire. For example, Groupon’s 2011 Superbowl advertisement was met by huge backlash
on Twitter, so much so that the CEO of Groupon had to explain their reasoning behind
choosing those specific advertisements on the company blog (Andrew 2011).

The technological advancements and increased connectivity online and offline have also
allowed an unprecedented number of new brands to be introduced in recent years globally
(Gerzema & Lebar 2009). Gerzema et al (Gerzema & Lebar 2009) discovered that consumer
attitudes towards all sizes and segments of brands were in serious decline. They observed
significant drops in key measures of brand value - ‘top of mind’ awareness, trust, regard and
admiration – aka the Brand Equity. The three major problems with the brands, they argue,
are:

1. Excess capacity

2. Lack of creativity

3. Loss of trust

The advent of Social Media has made a marketers life a lot more challenging. It can be
argued that it has become much harder to capture and sustain consumers’ attention and
interest in specific brands. In an attempt to address this issue, Gerzema et al (Gerzema &
Lebar 2009) propose a new quality to the brand, called ‘energised differentiation’ I.e. Brands
that reflect brand’s energy - communicate excitement, dynamism and creativity.

Social media does provide an opportunity to connect with the consumers and understand
their specific needs. Social media marketing provides unique opportunity to the marketers
to create ‘energised differentiation’ that Gerzema et al (Gerzema & Lebar 2009) talk about.
In order to do this, marketers needs to incorporate social media in the overall marketing
strategy of the company.

2.4 What is Viral Marketing?

Viral Marketing is the intentional influencing of consumer-to-consumer communication by
professional marketing techniques (Kozinets et al. 2010). It is also otherwise known as word-
of-mouth marketing (WOMM), buzz marketing and guerrilla marketing. Wilson (Wilson
2005) describes viral marketing as:

“Any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing
message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in
the message’s exposure and influence”.

People like to share their experiences with one another – the restaurants where they had
lunch, the movie they saw – and when the experiences are favourable, the
recommendations can snowball, resulting in runaway success (Dye 2000). In her paper,
Larsen (Larson 2009) argues that viral marketing through social media is the new format of
the traditional word-of-mouth marketing, only exponentially faster. It enables the word-of-
mouth to spread at the speed of thought (Ferguson 2008). In that sense, it can also be
translated as ‘networked enhanced WOM’ (Datta, Chowdhury & Chakraborty 2005).


One of the earliest examples of online viral marketing campaigns was created by Microsoft
Hotmail (squidoo n.d.) - by including a simple hyperlink “Get your free Hotmail account” at
the bottom of every email sent out by existing users. It allowed a simple way for the users to
action and create their own Hotmail account. Hotmail increased its customer base to over
12 million in just 18 months a result. Radder (Radder 2002) argues that the new and
improved technology has provided the customer an opportunity to demand and experience
for a personal, interactive and relational experience.

VM in social networks started with videos being posted on YouTube. For example, the
chicken viral video by Burger King in 2004 received over 20m hits (Clifford-Marsh 2009) .
However, these days VM campaigns are more integrated campaigns that are tied to other
more traditional forms of media. For example, the campaign for the movie The Dark Knight
incorporated billboards, commercials, social networks, fake websites, email blasts, online
puzzles etc. The movie grossed over $1bn worldwide (Readon 2009) .

It seems to be the case that the presence of millions of consumers on social networks, who
also share their experiences and views on brands they like or dislike, presents a unique
opportunity to the marketers – to not only understand the customers perspective of their
brands, but also to influence their perceptions quite rapidly using viral marketing concepts.

2.5 Advantages / Disadvantages of VM.

When looking to buy products/services almost 76% people rely on other people’s opinions
for product recommendations, versus 15% on advertising (Qualman 2009). Yang et al (Yang
& Allenby 2003) showed that the geographically defined network of consumers is more
useful than the demographic network for explaining consumer behaviour in purchasing
Japanese cars. Hill et al (Hill, Provost & Volinsky 2006) found that adding network
information, specifically whether a potential customer was already talking to an existing
customer, was predictive of the chances of adoption of a new phone service option. For the
customers linked to a prior customer, the adoption rate was 3–5 times greater than the
baseline. These recommendations come from people who are opinions leaders or someone


who has influence within a community. In order to capture the attention of these
influencers, marketers have to use targeted marketing campaigns.

VM campaign is a lower-cost option when compared to mass media marketing. It also allows
the marketers to target specific customers and has a high and rapid response rate. It
appears to be quite a straight forward option for the organisations and marketers to adopt
viral marketing strategies; however, the outcome of VM is hard to predict (Watts, Peretti &
Frumin 2007). Mass marketing, on the other hand, has a far wider reach and marketers can
get predictable returns from such campaigns. Watts et al (Watts, Peretti & Frumin 2007)
argue that combining viral marketing with mass marketing, in what they call Big Seed
Marketing, would allow marketers to get a more predictable return.

Marketers should also carefully consider the fact that viral marketing campaigns become
unmanageable once they gain a certain momentum. This can be a major problem for
marketers, especially if the campaign doesn’t have the desired outcome.

In a study in 2001, Bowman et al (Bowman & Narayandas 2001) found that self-reported
loyal customers were more likely to talk to others about the products when they were
dissatisfied, but, interestingly, they were not more likely to talk to others when they were
satisfied. To avoid this, marketers need to carefully monitor the early stages of a VM
campaign when they may have some control and there is an opportunity to take corrective
measures.

The low cost of social media marketing and the potential to reach and influence millions of
people through personal recommendation seems to be a very lucrative option for
marketers. However, if not managed properly, such campaigns also have the potential to
get out of hand very quickly and become unmanageable. Marketers need to keep this mind
and take a balanced approach.

2.6 Identifying the target audience for a viral marketing
campaign.


As described previously, internet users engage in social media on a variety of platforms.
Marketing messages and meaning on these platforms are not unidirectional, but rather are
exchanged among members of these social media networks.

In a study, Kozinets (Kozinets et al. 2010) found that motivations to participate are complex
and culturally embedded, shaped by communal interests and communicative orientations
and charged with moral hazard. The first challenge for the marketers is to identify the
networks that are relevant to their brand or campaign.

The social network models have traditionally suffered from the lack of data to analyse the
predictive nature of the network. However, Domingos (Domingos 2005) argues that massive
amount of data is now available on very large social networks, allowing the marketers to
build models of the individuals involved in the social media. Data on all the nodes in the
social networks now allows for an unprecedented level of analysis, understanding,
predictions and their productive use in decision-making. The analysis allows for new models
to be created that could be used to create VM plans that maximise positive WoM among
customers.

Similar to any social network in the physical world, influential users play a crucial role in
customers’ buying decisions in online social networks. Armano (Armano 2010), in his blog
wrote that sharing useful information that might help someone within your network scores
you points and builds equity. Domingos (Domingos 2005) defines network value of the
customer as, “the expected increase in sales to others that result from marketing to that
customer”. The second challenge for the marketers is to identify the customers with high
network value. While identifying the target audience, the key question they should ask
themselves is, “If we market to this particular set of customers, what is the expected profit
from the whole network, after the influence of those customers has propagated
throughout” (Domingos 2005).

Marketers should be aware that it is not just about numbers. The context in which these
numbers are used is a lot more crucial. Online users listen to other users for variety of
reasons and do not necessarily get influenced by everything they say. For example,


celebrities usually have most number of followers on social networks, but they do not
necessarily influence their followers’ buying decisions.

The amount of data now available on the internet where users freely share ideas about
brands and the reasons behind their choices they make as consumers allows the researchers
to perform insightful analysis. Kozinets (Kozinets 1998) coined the term Netnography - a
branch of Ethnography that analyses the free behaviour of individuals on internet using
marketing research techniques to provide useful insights. In order to identify which specific
influencers to use as seeds, marketers need to use these research techniques across the
targeted social networks, in addition to the short listed high network value customers.

The literature seems to fall short in that there doesn’t seem to be the recognition that
consumers use a variety of languages, slangs, abbreviations etc. when expressing their
opinions about brands on their social networks. The idea of using these as insights is all well
and good, but there aren’t systems out there yet that are capable of accurately judging the
mood of the consumer, especially when they deviate from the standard language rules.
Marketers need to be very careful when using such automated tools as the results can be
quite deceptive.

2.7 Creating and executing a VM campaign - main
characteristics.

The researchers view on whether a viral marketing campaign can be orchestrated seems to
be divided. Watts (Watts, Peretti & Frumin 2007) argue that it is very hard – if not
impossible to predict the success of a viral marketing campaign.

Many other researchers have also written about various aspects of creating a VM campaign.
Barnes et al (Barnes & Mattson 2008) in a longitudinal study of Inc. 500, found a significant
growth in the use of social media and viral marketing technologies. Setty (Setty 2009), a
well-known entrepreneur and blogger in the Silicon Valley, analysed nine viral videos in his
blog to define seven key characteristics that he believes should be included in a viral


message. Wilson (Wilson 2005) further defines six elements of an effective viral marketing
strategy. Dye (Dye 2000) defined the assessment criteria for the buzz-worthiness of
products. The book, The Dragonfly Effect (Aaker & Smith 2010) propose a four winged
framework (see Appendix F, point 1) for social media marketers to get amplification or
infectious action from the customers engaged in social networks.

Dye (Dye 2000) proposed a list of powerful tactics (see Appendix F, point 2) for creating a
viral marketing campaign. Balter (Balter 2005) describes creating a Seeding campaign as one
in which the product is placed among influential consumers so that they can communicate
favourably about it to other consumers. However, managing favourable outcomes in social
media can be tricky as influencers can write positive or negative comments about the
product, so identifying influencers and influencing them should be done very carefully,
ideally based on relevance of the content, influence (traffic) and screened - possible on a
one-to-one basis - before they are chosen to be seeded.

Kozinets et al (Kozinets et al. 2010) defines four important factors (see Appendix F, point 3)
that influence WOM communication. Highlighting the importance of type of narrative
(Evaluation, Explanation, Embracing and Endorsement) in the WOM communication,
Kozinets et al (Kozinets et al. 2010) argue that the type of WOMM promotion, including the
product type, must be considered (see Appendix F, point 4). They further argues that
marketers need to carefully understand the on-going character narrative, communication
forum and the communal norms in the social network(s) where they plan to execute a VM
campaign. They can achieve this by:

 Identifying and elaborating on the context, including the product being marketed
and the target market.

 Measuring and classifying different types of character narratives and communication
forums.

 Understanding and respecting communal norms (explore and classify the norms and
relate to particular outcomes such as reciprocity, trust and role of authority).

 Considering the implications associated with commercial-communal tensions.


Larson (Larson 2009) make an interesting point in that it is essential to ensure that there are
other components that support viral marketing campaign and that there is an appeal to the
customer’s emotions. Larson (Larson 2009) also emphasises that the message should be in a
format that is easy to share and that the message arouse a response in the consumer strong
enough to result in the forwarding, or sharing, of that message with their social network
(How to launch a low-cost viral marketing effort 2008).

Linking viral marketing campaigns to the company strategy and capabilities, Larson (Larson
2009) also points out that the companies need to be prepared both internally and externally
in order to positively benefit from consumer interaction. Larson (Larson 2009) also outlines
one of the main challenge is for the marketers to monitor, manage and influence the two-
way communication that results from the application of social media as once the message
reaches the point where it becomes viral, not only the spread cannot be controlled, but the
entire brand message and its interpretation is no longer in the hands of the company.

2.8 Measuring effectiveness of a VM Campaign

Emerging social network analysis and visualisation techniques offer the marketers to delve
deeper into consumer minds (Whitney 2010) – to identify connectors, influencers,
implementers and other types of members in the group. Whitney (Whitney 2010) describes
that social network visualisations can help identify important connecting points such as pre-
established relationships, shared expertise, and who may have information that isn’t
obvious from their current roles. EventGraphs (Hansen, Smith & Shneiderman 2010) can be
used to illustrate the structure of connections and communications among people
discussing an event. These EventGraphs can help identify sub-groups within larger
conversations, as well as individuals with unique social signatures. Jesse Thomas and Brian
Solis (Solis & Thomas 2011), the social media gurus, recently developed an inforgraphic of
the Twitterverse (See Appendix E) depicting important tools to help marketers more
effectively navigate, engage, analyse and measure participation on Twitter.


Many other tools are now emerging that allow marketers to analyse multiple social media
networks (Some examples are PeerIndex.net and PeopleBrowsr.com), but these tools are
still very basic in terms of providing consolidated analytics to the marketers.

The other challenge for marketers is the Sentiment Analysis. Current systems are not good
enough to accurately measures emotions. Companies that currently claim to do this are only
touching the surface as they match words but not relate whether they are meaningful or
not. The variations in the language used i.e. abbreviations, slang, interpretations of words,
local dialects etc. makes it even more difficult to develop systems that can accurately
measure sentiments with respect to brands in online conversations. Marketers still have to
depend on specialised tools to analyse individual social networks and then perform a
manually qualitative analysis to make sense of the cross network data and the use of
sentiments in the online conversation.

2.9 How to make a Viral Marketing campaign sustainable?

There is very little written on whether a VM campaign can be made sustainable. Generally
speaking, viral messages are associated with large spikes where the message takes a certain
amount of time to reach the Tipping Point (Gladwell 2000) and then spreads uncontrollably
and then dies down once the message loses its uniqueness. However, marketers should take
a different approach when it comes to sustainability in product/services related VM
campaigns – one of sustaining the interest of the customers once they have experienced the
product or service on offer. Targeted VM campaigns differ from general viral messages in
that they are designed for the customer to give a taste of the product or service on offer.
Once the marketers have the customers’ attention, they should use the standard product
management and marketing principles to help sustain customer interest – be it engaging
with customers, listening to their feedback and using it to drive improvements, managing
their expectations, developing brand loyalty and delighting them when it comes to providing
customer service.

2.10 Summary

There seems to be a perception that Social Media is a quick and low cost solution to market
products to a targeted audience. Marketers talk about developing viral marketing
campaigns using social media as the key to reach out to a large consumer base in a very
short time span. Researchers have talked about the characteristics of a viral message, its
advantages and disadvantages, however, there seems to a gap between the actual study of
viral messages and how they are, or can be, utilised by the organisations to market their
products. This paper will aim to fill this gap by answering these key research questions:

 Is viral marketing of digital products different from viral messages (e.g. YouTube
videos)?

 What are the steps an organisation needs to take while considering, designing and
executing a viral marketing campaign using social media?

 Once a viral marketing campaign is successful, what should an organisation do to
sustain the customer’s interest?


3. Methodology
This chapter provides an outline of the research methodology used to answer the research
questions - the research approach, a description of primary data collection process for the
interviews, secondary research, data analysis techniques used and limitations of the
adopted research method.

3.1 Research approach

The research approach influences design and provides an opportunity to consider benefits
and limitations of various approaches available to the researcher (Crewell 2003). Two types
of approaches are available – deductive and inductive. Deductive approach tests theories,
while an inductive approach forms theories (Marcoulides 1998). This report uses inductive
research approach as it aims to formulate hypothesis and develop general theory around
how organisations could go about marketing digital products, especially viral marketing,
using social media.

There are two methods available for data analysis – Qualitative and Quantitative.
Qualitative research is “a research strategy that usually emphasises words rather than
quantification in the collection and analysis of data” (Bryman & Bell 2007), while
quantitative research is based on data analysis to generate reliability. Qualitative research
better reflects “the quality of the lived experience of individuals, which cannot be reduced
to numerical values using statistical analysis” (Hewitt-Taylor 2001). Social media is a
dynamic field which is continuously changing. This means that although quantitative analysis
would provide data, designing an appropriate survey to get qualified opinions and
understand the deeper issues in this area was quite challenging (Amaratunga et al. 2002).

This report uses the qualitative method to explore the research questions as it allows
researchers to conduct in-depth explorations of a particular phenomenon (Crewell 2003).


This choice is further justified as the research questions focus on opinions, feelings and
experiences, thus providing subjective data.

3.2 Data collection methods

In-depth interviews act as the primary source of the research and syndicate services
(Twitter, blogs, Facebook groups etc.) as the secondary sources.

Qualitative analysis allows for a better understanding and interpretation of the experiences
of their subjects (Tvede & Ohnemus 2001). This is important for this research as it looks at a
wide variety of experiences, understanding of the subject and interpretation of the data
gathered. In order to achieve this, in-depth personal interviews with market participants
were conducted at prearranged locations. The discussion in the interviews was structured
around the core research questions, but no set questionnaire was developed. The
interviews themselves were semi-structured in that even though the questions were based
on research questions, they were kept open ended and the direction of the discussions was
based on the interviewee's experience and area of expertise.

The reasons for selecting semi-structured interviews as the preferred approach are:

 They involve a series of open-ended questions allowing the discussion on research
topics.

 They allow the interviewer to encourage the interviewee to consider a question
further.

 They provide a high level of response.

Necessary precautions were taken to ensure that there were no faults in recording the
interviews. Interviews were recorded on an audio recording device and then carefully
transcribed to avoid any such issues.

The questions in the interviews were sequenced in the following conceptual order:


 Social media strategy and capability assessment

 Marketing strategy, especially the importance of an integrated approach

 Design attributes for Product / Service for them to be considered for Viral Marketing

 Designing a viral marketing message for product/services

 Importance of influencers

 Executing, managing and monitoring a viral marketing campaign, and the importance
of sentiment analysis

 Exploring whether a viral marketing campaign can be made sustainable

Candidates for the interview were selected on the basis of their experience in social media
marketing and their relevance in the managing overall strategy and executing specific parts
of the SMM strategy.

Due to geographical constraints and professional commitments, one of the interviews - with
the Online Community Manager of KIK Interactive Inc. - had to be done as email
conversations. It would have been better to conduct this interview as a telephone
conversation but it wasn’t feasible because of the time differences and other work
commitments on their part. All interviews were conducted in March 2011.

3.3 Interview subjects

 Colin Gilchrist – SocialTailor.com: Colin is a social media strategist, who helps
organisations assess their overall marketing strategy and help them integrate social
media marketing as part of this strategy

 Andrew Burnett - UrbanNiche: Andrew helps companies design and execute social
media marketing campaigns. Andrew's company specialises in pushing the marketing
message with a view to reach a point where the message could go viral.


 Jenny Herbison and Rachel Armitage - Skyscanner: Skyscanner is an online flight
search company that has recently launched a very successful mobile phone
application. Rachel and Jenny, together, are responsible for the overall marketing
strategy for all geographical markets Skyscanner operates in.

 Tera Dargavel – KIK Interactive, Inc.: KIK Interactive, Inc. provides a mobile
application that allows cross platform real time texts on mobile devices. KIK was
downloaded on 1 million devices within first 15 days of its launch. Tera works as the
Online Community Manager at KIK.

3.4 Secondary sources

The rapid changes in the field of social media mean that there is a scarcity of academic
literature in this area. Hence, a lot of research was focused on works by opinion leaders and
practitioners in the field of social media marketing. In order to get an appropriate range of
secondary resources, wide reading was done including these sources:

 Analysts reports

 Industry and academic journals

 Blogs

 Twitter

 Facebook groups

 White papers

Twitter turned out to be one of the most useful resources for secondary research as it
seems to have become a platform where all the latest ideas are shared in real time, based
on the experiences of the companies and the thought leaders involved in this area.


3.5 Data analysis

The data processing in this report is based on the technique described by Kumar et al
(Kumar, Tan & Steinbach 2005). Once the interviews had been conducted and the
transcripts had been prepared, the usable material, by themes, was drawn out from the
transcripts through a process called Coding. The coded research material was copied and
pasted into separate Microsoft Word files, one for each theme. These files provided an easy
look through while writing the Empirical Materials chapter. The qualitative data was then
analysed using the interpretive approach (Miles & Huberman 1994).

The material collected through qualitative methods is invariably unstructured and unwieldy
(Bryman & Bell 2007). It is the rough material collected from the field, if the form of
videotapes, conversations etc., that form the basis of analysis (Bogdan & Biklen 1992). Due
to its complicated nature, there is no standardised approach to the analysis of the
qualitative data (Saunders, Lewis & Thornhill 1998).

The raw material resulting from the data gathering process in qualitative research is usually
in the form of words, and there are different strategies to deal with words. Miles et al (Miles
& Huberman 1994) outlined three approaches for analysing qualitative data – interpretive,
collaborative social research, and social anthropology. Creswell (Crewell 2003) further
identified five approaches – case study, biography, phenomenology, grounded theory, and
ethnography.

This report uses the interpretive approach to analyse the data as it is used to present a
holistic view of data rather than a condensed view. The results of this analysis are discussed
in the Analysis chapter.

3.6 Research limitations

The exploratory nature of the research and the majority of experienced practitioners living
in distant locations - most successful social media marketing firms are either based in
expertise were limited. However, much consideration was given in selecting the suitable


interviewees mainly via professional recommendations in the social media industry and a
review of their work. Even though care was taken while identifying the right interviewees,
the number of interviews meant that the findings of the research are not tested to be
statistically significant. Further to this, mitigating any kind of bias that interviewees might
have had, as argued by Robson (Robson 1993), is limited by my understating of the subject
area and interpretation.

3.7 Ethical considerations

The interviewees have been informed of the academic purpose of this study. They have
granted permission for using their details in the report. The research is based on analysing
primary and secondary data using frameworks already developed by researchers. A soft
copy of the completed report will be made available to the interviewees. This research also
has approval from University of Edinburgh and gives rise to no ethical issues.


4. Empirical Material
In literature review section, we presented the theory behind various aspects of viral
marketing and how businesses should go about creating a strategy, a plan, executing the
plan and monitoring the campaigns. In this section, we will present the research data from
the interviews conducted with industry specialists and practitioners.

4.1 Importance of strategy

The interviewees were asked about the importance of an overall marketing strategy for
companies while considering social media marketing or viral marketing as a tool to market
their products and services.

Gilchrist (Gilchrist 2011) of SocialTailor.com emphasised on the importance of employee
buy in and the need to have a crisis management strategy for the companies - before even
considering social media strategies – to make sure they are protected if things go wrong.

One of the first things that I look at is when they are developing their
strategy, they need to analyse and assess the employees throughout
the business.

One of the other things for big corporations is that they need to know
that there brand is protected, so what we need to put in place is crisis
management - the bottom line is that you are listing all the potential
things that could go wrong and are likely to go wrong.

Viral marketing strategy should be integrated in overall marketing strategy and the content
strategy, and that the organisations should clearly define goals, responsibilities and set out a
communication strategy (Gilchrist 2011).

In terms of the strategy, you need to look at content strategy, in fact
there are lots of different elements you need to look at, but you need


to figure out who is doing what? What is that you want to achieve – is
it just more sales or is brand awareness, who is going to deliver it,
etc.?

Herbison et al (Herbison & Armitage 2011) of Skyscanner also alluded to the fact that the
social media marketing needs to be integrated with the overall marketing strategy, and it is
important that same people manage all the channels in a particular market.

Managing these contacts throughout the organisation is key whether
it’s through SEO, through PR or anything else. When do an app, we
make sure there is an integrated view of all the contacts.

The same people managing it is important as well. We have country
specialists that look after PR, SEO and all promotions ensuring that
they can see the opportunities across channels.

Herbison et al (Herbison & Armitage 2011) also described how they used an integrated
approach while launching their mobile phone application:

For each market we have main networks and local networks that are
tried and tested, but for the mobile app we used different people as
it’s the different audience and you cannot go with the same people.
It’s a different product, so we have to treat it differently. Everyone in
the company was very proactive in pitching the mobile app. It wasn’t
just the specific people, but everyone in the company.

Herbison et al (Herbison & Armitage 2011) described the inclusion of operations
department to highlight importance of an overall business strategy, and also to emphasise
the importance of capacity/capability management while executing viral marketing
campaigns:

When we were launching the app, a lot of planning went into that as
to what was the right time to launch it and making sure we had
additional capacity


That’s managed by our operations department. They have
contingency of managing if we suddenly have a surge in traffic. We
have it all planned out and we have capacity to manage say 30% more
traffic to deal sudden surge

If we have knowledge beforehand and expecting a spike we can warn
operations to expect a spike.

Burnett (Burnett 2011) of Urban Niche emphasised this point and argued that the messages
are spread through “every network imaginable”. Dargavel (Dargavel 2011) of KIK Interactive,
Inc. indirectly made a similar point:

Viral marketing is a large effort too - the medium must be decided on,
the marketing story and how it is going to be presented and then the
distribution efforts.

The story and messaging has to make sense and align with the brand -
because people nowadays are much more savvy about marketing and
can see right through blatant, selfish efforts to get as many eyes on
the company name and message as possible.

4.2 Important factors for viral messages

Interviewees were asked to describe factors that would help create a viral message for the
product or service.

Burnett (Burnett 2011) argued that the emotional trigger is crucial for anything to go viral.
He also argues that the product or service being marketed has to be exceptionally good – so
good that people would not be afraid to put their name behind it while promoting it.


You need an emotional trigger for anything to go viral. Most people
think of viral as being funny, but it doesn’t need to be funny at all. It
could be something that’s informative, or something that’s tragic.

It’s all endorsement and if I am going to endorse something in my
name, it needs to be bloody good – it cannot be OK or mediocre.

If you want a spike at the launch, then you really need to find
individuals with clout (with a ‘c’), even involve them in the process of
creating it. Understand the socials sharing mechanics of what we are
creating. Understand the viral mechanisms that we can include within
the product/services that we are creating.

Dargavel (Dargavel 2011) made a similar point with respect to an emotional trigger. :

Often, the medium is a video and the content involves something that
makes people feel sympathy (or empathy), or is something humorous,
or is something extraordinary to witness.

Burnett (Burnett 2011) also emphasised the importance of making the product social
friendly by using Viber – a mobile phone application – as an example:

The guys at Viber have been really clever in the way they have
designed the app. You can automatically access your phone book
through Viber and the app looks through that to see who else is using
Viber.

It just becomes really easy for users to spread the word. It’s cheap, its
user friendly and it makes it really easy for me to contact others to ask
them to use it as well.

Burnett (Burnett 2011) further highlighted that making the products available for free (and
generating revenue by displaying advertisements) further makes the customers buying
decision really easy:


To an extent it’s the freemium model. Do I want my choice of free
music anytime of the day and night? Yes, of course I do.

Dargavel (Dargavel 2011) also agreed with the ease of availability and sharing:

Making it very easy to share the content with friends (i.e., do not put
it behind a pay wall! It will never go viral)

Gilchrist (Gilchrist 2011) believed in experimenting with different concepts for a brand and
testing them in the market to see what people might like and on which platform:

Having chatted to a CEO of a media company, what he does is that he
creates lots and lots of small case studies with the clients brand to see
what works and on what platform, and if one particular thing works
then he would pour lots of money into it to do it properly.

Herbison et al (Herbison & Armitage 2011) also argue about the importance of having a
good product that people like and emphasised on really understanding the market, the
channels that work best in each market and finding the right influencers in each of those
markets and channels within each market.

I think as much as anything, your product has to be strong and when
you give a good product to these people, they will give you a good
review and that’s key.

We have done a number of different things in different markets.
Within each of our managed markets we have identified places where
we need to be to get our app reviewed.

4.3 Importance of influencers


On the question of the importance of influencers in spreading the message about the
product, all interviewees were unanimous in the importance of finding the right
influencers in making a viral marketing campaign a success.

Herbison et al (Herbison & Armitage 2011) describe how they could see the spikes in
downloads when the applications were reviewed and given a good rating. They also
compared downloads to the markets where they were delayed in getting reviews and saw a
positive correlation:

The best example of doing that was that on the review sites, we were
very lucky that we had good contacts of journalists and bloggers and
we just sent them the information, they reviewed the app for us and
then there are people who trust these reviews and see them as
authorities for that, and that’s when you can see the downloads
spikes when they have reviewed the app and given it five stars.

In a couple of our markets, we were a bit delayed compared to others
in terms of doing that, but you can quite accurately see the point at
which we exerted those efforts versus the downloads.

Herbison et al (Herbison & Armitage 2011) reiterated the importance of an integrated
approach in that different approaches worked in different markets, and the channel where
the influencers came from differed between markets.

It’s different for different markets. We make best use of tools where
they make sense and we certainly do manage SEO’s and making sure
who is linking to us and how those links are being passed on. There
are a couple of tools that we started using that are particularly helpful
for tracking relationships.

Gilchrist (Gilchrist 2011) also agreed with the idea that influencers can be found on various
networks or channels, and highlighted the importance of doing research to find out the
right people in the particular sector where product is going to be launched.


There are lots and lots of different ways. For example, AllTop.com
which is an aggregate news websites, advanced blog search through
blogsearch.google.com.

Finding blogs that are opinionated but will also talk about your
product is important. They cannot always be bought, it depends on
the ethics on them, but if they can be bought it’s probably not good
for you the companies.

Burnett (Burnett 2011) agreed with the idea of influencers and their importance, but
offered his specific insight into who the real influencers are i.e. it’s not just a matter of how
many people follow you, but the compound effect of a network of people who will endorse
your message because they trust your judgment, and are influential enough to further push
the message in their network – to the point that the message reaches a critical mass where
it can become truly viral, where no further pushing is required.

There are definitely people who influence things, but it still have to
have genuine content on it. In the social web, the main currency is
endorsement.

There are people who you trust, so you endorse their things and then
there is a reciprocal nature to it that people who trust you will
endorse your things, but it has to be a two way exchange. It then
comes back to the fact that if something is genuinely worth talking
about, it reaches a certain critical mass and then it takes off by itself –
and that’s what an actual viral is.

It’s a relatively tight knit community – there are probably a couple of
hundred people that are really any good, maybe 500 but no more
than that – and this is global. These are your influencers / endorsers
who are not celebrities. So, if Stephen Fry retweets you, of course it is
going to big because he is got millions of followers on Twitter, but the
people who have got 2000 followers can pull a lot of right strings in


the background. Of those people there are around 500 max. Basically,
you all work together, not in a financial sense at all, but there are
favours you trade.

Burnett (Burnett 2011) also explained that submission of product to review websites or
blogs works as well:

These blogs will create content about your product. These blogs then
reach out to power users on various networks because they want
readership and they say, “Have you seen this story?” And then the
whole thing starts getting attention. All the links from the blogs get
shared on these networks and you also get secondary benefits of SEO
from it. And people then talking about it gets converted into
downloads.

When asked about how to know when something has reached this critical mass, Burnett’s
(Burnett 2011) view was that it is usually very intuitive. Dargavel (Dargavel 2011) also
highlighted the importance of online influential space like blogs and review websites:

In the app space you may really hope that your news (press releases,
blog posts) gets picked up by Hacker News because it's one of the
most widely read news sources for Silicon Valley and the tech
industry. You may try to distribute your content to journalists at
various publications (Huffington Post, Tech Crunch, etc.) or you may
just submit it to Reddit or other link collecting sites like that. Again,
there is no tried and true method to viral marketing but there are best
practices.

4.4 Executing a campaign


Once a marketing campaign is launched, marketers need to be able to monitor its
progress, engage with the customers, manage their feedback and measure the success of
the campaign. Interviewees were asked how they managed this.

All interviewees depended on a variety of tools to carry out the monitoring tasks.

Burnett (Burnett 2011) used Raven (to manage SEO at the domain level), Trak.ly (to track
individual URL), PostRank (for new launches) and Google Analytics (for general traffic
information)

Gilchrist (Gilchrist 2011) preferred using a company called Forth Matrix as they combine all
the information together, instead of using separate tools.

Dargavel (Dargavel 2011) highlighted that there are free tools on the web that can be used
to, “listen to the whole of the web or parts of it”.

Herbison et al (Herbison & Armitage 2011) described that their company uses a variety of
tools:

For SEO we are currently using a mixture of Raven, Linkdex, SEOMoz.
We also use Basecamp for project planning and tracking. In terms of
analytics we are big fans of Google Analytics and the various other
tools Google provides (Webmaster, Adplanner etc.) and usually find
that their free offering fulfills our needs. That said, for the mobile
app, we use Flurry which specifically tracks mobile sessions

Customer engagement among the interviewees happen through responding to customer
queries through emails, responding to comments on blogs, or on Twitter. They agreed that
specific processes and communication strategies should be developed in the organisations
to manage customer feedback. Only one out of four interviewees talked about proactively
monitoring the online space for sentiment analysis or netnography concepts in order to
figure what people are talking about their brands in the social web. Herbison et al
(Herbison & Armitage 2011) describe the situation at Skyscanner as:


We have people who email us and every email gets a response, so we
do track our reputation online, but we are taking that one step
forward looking at emotions online. We are not there yet.

Herbison (Herbison & Armitage 2011) further pointed out the importance of doing the
sentiment analysis correctly and allocating enough resource to it:

In my previous experience I worked with clients managing their
reputation and looking at negative emotions, but it’s all very well
knowing them but unless you can action on it, it’s useless. We were
giving all this information to our clients, but they couldn’t action any
of it because they didn’t have the resource.

There are very few organisations that have the time and resource to
engage properly. Also, one thing you do not want to do is to engage
incorrectly because you will end up doing more harm. If you are
dipping in and out, it is unsatisfactory to the user base

Dargavel (Dargavel 2011) also highlighted the importance of dedicated
resource for customer engagement:

A brand, or even a company representative, is much more able to
answer questions or concerns in blog comments or by responding to
tweets. Negative conversations are usually mediated by explanation.

4.5 Sustainability of a VM campaign

Interviewees were asked if they thought a viral marketing campaign be made sustainable
over a long period

The interviewees thought that it was very hard, if not impossible, to do so. It was felt that a
possible outcome was to increase the average traffic over a period of time following the


viral marketing campaign if the product and/or the viral message was very good. Burnett
(Burnett 2011) pointed out that:

Either you consistently create engaging content that’s going to get
spike after spike after spike, or you should look at it in a way that
when you create a spike you increase the average traffic towards the
product/service or the website. So, the plateau after the spike should
be higher than the one before if you have done it cleverly. If you have
not done it cleverly the plateau will be the same and if you have done
it stupidly the average will actually be lower.

Gilchrist (Gilchrist 2011) was of the similar view:

Once it has spiked it’s great, but then let’s have a steady growth, and
then another peak and then another peak. Trying to sustain the spike
is very very difficult. This is because what you are doing is you are
shocking people to get them interested. To constantly shock people,
the campaign has to be so entertaining that everyone is going to love
it, but you will never be able to make everyone happy and sustain it.
It’s very very unusual.

Burnett (Burnett 2011) further stressed that designing the product with social sharing
mechanics in mind and engaging influencers at any early stage of the product design will
increase the chances of a product going viral:

Understand the socials sharing mechanics of what we are creating.
Understand the viral mechanisms that we can include within the
product/services that we are creating.

You can also build in mechanisms to share things online within the
product. It is important to note that the earlier you engage the
influencers, the better. Once you have already done it, there isn’t
much influencers can do to help design the product/service.


Dargavel (Dargavel 2011) thought it may be possible to sustain a viral
campaign, but warned about the fine balance between reiteration of a theme
and an overkill:

Take a look at Old Spice - I think they're trying to make their viral
marketing campaign a little more long lasting. So, when you have a
good idea you can stick with it and reiterate - but there is a fine line
between a theme and overkill.


5. Analysis
My interest in social media started as a quest for more information. The new applications on
the mobile devices (for example, Flipboard on iPad) have made it much easier to identify,
target and receive information from the specific sources that are of interest to me. Twitter
has increasingly become an important online source for the latest information in almost any
area –including but not limited to news, ideas, opinions and reflections.

In November 2010, I came across a tweet about a product called KIK - a cross platform
instant messaging application. It caught my interest as I had seen Blackberry users raving
about the Blackberry Messenger (BBM). A simple search for #KIK on Twitter revealed that
thousands of people were talking about this product, downloading it and giving positive or
negative feedback about it. Two weeks after launching, KIK was downloaded on more than 1
million mobile devices. Achieving such a huge number of downloads in such a short span of
time caught my interest.

A few questions sprung to mind straight away. How did they manage to do it? Was it just
luck or a carefully carved strategy? Are the marketers aware of the ongoing conversation on
the social networks about their brand, and if so, how do they manage it? Then the
conversation on Twitter slowed down considerably, and the question I asked myself was
what could marketers do to sustain the consumer interest in their brand?

In December 2010, I came across another app, Viber, a competitor to Skype, providing free
calls between iPhones over a 3G network. It was a similar story with Viber in that it achieved
1 million download in just 5 days. KIK now didn’t seem like a one off app that got lucky.

I started looking for already existing research on these topics. It was surprising when I found
that most of the academic material was quite dated, more so because social media and its
usage is changing so rapidly at the moment that it is difficult for the academic world to catch
up.

I also realised that Twitter was one of the main sources for finding information. Most
opinions leaders, industry specialists and even industry and academic journals tweet about

their papers, blog entries, comments on other members’ articles and ideas. However,
Twitter is like a stream of consciousness, with ideas and thoughts flowing vertically on a 19
inch screen - just like credits flowing on the screen at the end of a movie, but only much
faster. This stream of data is on a variety of subjects and comes from hundreds of people
you follow on Twitter. Once I managed to get a handle on the conversations that were
specific to social media marketing, I started reading blogs, industry and academic journals
and whitepapers to understand how companies go about using social media as an effective
marketing tool.

This gave me deep insights into: how organisations go about using social media, latest
development and opinions from the thought leaders in social media, reviews and opinions
on various strategies and tools used in social media marketing, and importance of sentiment
analysis, or Netnography (Kozinets 2010) of the consumer conversation about a certain
brand. This secondary research also allowed me to get an understanding of the key areas
surrounding viral marketing of the products. It helped me develop a framework for the
interviews. Twitter also helped me identify some of the key social media influencers and
converse with them. For example, connection with the Online Community Manager of KIK
was established using Twitter, and after a few tweets back and forth she agreed to
participate in my research.

Below is an analysis of the primary and secondary research.

5.1 Viral Marketing

Viral marketing literature seems to be divided into two types of viral campaigns: campaigns
that go viral just because they appeal to human emotions – the one’s that do not necessary
have a viral marketing strategy behind them. For example, YouTube videos that catch
people attention and go viral over a certain period. The second one is the strategic viral
marketing campaigns around a product or a service, a brand or even just a message. These
campaigns are well thought out and planned. More often than not, people seem to use
these interchangeably when talking about viral campaigns. In the interviews, the companies


that didn’t have their own products seemed to have a broad focus on viral messages
(Gilchrist 2011), while product companies were more focused on the properties that were
more suitable to making their own products go viral (Dargavel 2011) (Herbison & Armitage
2011). Since the focus of this paper is on digital products, it mainly covers the marketing
campaigns that are carefully planned for digital products to viral. This means that the
conclusion may differ from designing viral campaigns if the focus was mainly raising the
awareness of the brand.

5.2 Strategy

Before we look at the specifics of a viral marketing campaign, it is important to understand
the overall context in which a company would want to use viral marketing. The research
shows most companies have an overall marketing strategy, and if viral marketing is part of
that strategy, then it needs to have defined goals, resource with assigned responsibilities,
and a plan of action (Gilchrist 2011) (Dargavel 2011) (Herbison & Armitage 2011).

There seem to be enough examples of viral marketing campaigns getting negative publicity
for the company – for example, Groupon’s superbowl advertisement or Threshers discount
coupons (Andrew 2011). The un-predictive and unmanageable nature of viral messages can
be dangerous for the companies. Watts et al (Watts, Peretti & Frumin 2007) talk about
combining viral marketing and mass media marketing, in what they call Big Seed Marketing,
to achieve maximum reach and to counter the unpredictable nature of the viral marketing
campaigns. The research also highlights the importance of having a crisis strategy in case
things do go wrong.

The companies need to understand the markets they operate in and the marketing channels
that are most effective in each of these markets. A marketing strategy should then be
defined, as part of an overall business strategy, covering the marketing techniques for each
combination of market and market channel (Herbison & Armitage 2011). Whether viral
marketing is part of this strategy or not should be decided on the merits of each channel
within the market(s) the company operates in. For example, Twitter seems to provide an


easy platform for ideas to go viral, by using the hashtag facility. Every day, there are
trending topics that are referenced using these hashtags on Twitter. These trends are in a
way similar to viral messages in that they spread when users use those words in their
tweets. There has to be a trigger for the users to do that. In a way this is similar to the
emotional triggers that were mentioned in the interviews. However, Twitter, as a marketing
channel, may only be relevant for certain markets and the marketers should be aware of
that.

5.3 Capabilities

The research shows that while defining the marketing strategy, the companies’ capabilities
needs to be assessed (Gilchrist 2011). One would expect this to be common sense, but it
seems that it is often overlooked especially when it comes to social media marketing. There
is growing literature that supports the need of an Online Community Manager in the
companies to manage all aspects of social media. The interviewees in the primary research
were unanimous in their opinion that companies need to assign specific people and have
clear responsibilities when it comes to social media marketing (Herbison & Armitage 2011)
(Gilchrist 2011) (Dargavel 2011). These responsibilities can range from delivering marketing
messages, monitoring and managing the overall community and marketing campaigns,
engaging with customers, and listening and responding to customer feedback. Viral
marketing, by its very nature, makes this even harder as the sheer number of customers
engaging with the company could increase exponentially.

Having appropriate system capabilities within the company was also highlighted in the
interviews, especially when companies are looking to use viral marketing as the tool to
market their digital products (Herbison & Armitage 2011). In the case of KIK, Viber and
Skyscanner, hundreds of thousands of download requests could hit the servers in a matter
of hours. Companies need to build a strategy around this exponential increase in traffic
when considering the viral marketing route. Failure to deal with this could result in
potentially irrecoverable damage to the brand.


This exponential increased traffic could also mean a similar increase in customers trying to
engage with the company. The companies need to decide how to tackle this increase in
customer engagement.

5.4 Product

Interviewees felt that emotional connection with the receiver is one most important
variable in the spread of a viral message (Gilchrist 2011) (Burnett 2011) (Setty 2009). The
other is the ease with which the receiver can pass it on to their network (Burnett 2011).
Online viral messages, like videos, that appeal to the viewers can be easily shared over
internet through blogs, websites and social networks.

The research shows that digital products are slightly different. The product themselves have
to be brilliant at what they are meant to do in addition to the promotions around them.
They should also possess characteristics that allow the user of the products to spread the
message easily (Burnett 2011) (Setty 2009). Viber’s ability to invite other users from within
the product and easy connections to the social networks help customers share their
experiences very easily.

Price is another characteristic. It seems to be the case the offering a free product for the
customers to try the basic functionality, and a paid version for the premium functionality
could lure a lot more customers to start with (Burnett 2011). On the other hand, a really
good product can demand a premium price and people will still buy it. They key difference
here is usually in the speed of adoption. Free digital products seem to get a wider spread
more quickly while the paid products may reach the similar amount of downloads, but it
takes a lot more time to get there.

5.5 Influencers


Knowing the key influencers in each market and each channel within the market is key to
any marketing campaign. According to the research, viral marketing of the digital products
seems to be no different. Getting the right package to the influencer is important as well i.e.
understand what motivates each influencer and provide them with what they are looking
for. For example, in some case monetary rewards may be frowned upon. Influencers write
about products as they are passionate about them rather than seeking money. In a typical
Product Diffusion Curve (Godin 2005) they want to be seen as the Innovators or the very
early adopters who influence the majority of people – that’s what gets them going. So,
many a times an exclusive preview of the product might do more wonders than a monetary
reward.

What seems to make viral marketing different, according to the research, is the concerted
effort by the key influencers in the online space, to push the product and the marketing
message to a critical point where no further market push is required and the customers
themselves become the product evangelists who then promote the products within their
own networks (Burnett 2011).

5.6 Creating a campaign

Traditional viral campaigns contain highly creative and unique content with emotional
impact (Setty 2009). The secondary research seems to suggest that all viral marketing
campaigns need this kind of content. However, the interviewees had different point of
views. The interviewees from companies that had digital products seem to suggest that a
good product promoted in traditional ways using highly influential people in the right
channels in the right markets are the best way to go about marketing the product and
building momentum (Herbison & Armitage 2011). However, the interviewees who came
from a consulting or a strategic point of view were divided in their opinion in that one of
them stressed on the importance of creativity of the promotional message around the
product and the other about the importance of both creativity combined with a brilliant
product.


Further to this, everyone seemed to agree on the fact that the consumers today are very
clever when it comes to identifying whether a campaign is genuine or just a selfish effort to
get the company noticed. So, the marketing efforts have to be very high-quality and ensure
that the receiver gets a genuine benefit from the content.

In my opinion, the fantastic product is absolutely crucial to any viral marketing campaign for
digital products, unless the company is aiming to create a one hit wonder, in which case the
product itself is irrelevant. Ideally the product needs to be designed for social spread with
ideas from influencers – to get an early buy-in. Designing a creative promotional message
that would have a viral appeal in addition to a good product should increase the chances for
a product going viral. However, creating a message that is genuine and makes sense - one
that aligns with the brand, identifying the right influencers in the right markets,
understanding what motivates them and engaging with them accordingly, and a high quality
joined up effort from people within companies is far more important.

5.7 Campaign management

The three main areas that the research points out as important in terms of campaign
execution are Seeding, Monitoring and Managing.

Seeding is about influencing the influencer i.e. making sure enough key influencers in the
target markets like the product and they are ready to promote it in their channels, hopefully
to the extent that the message gathers enough momentum to reach the Tipping Point.

The interviewees seemed to agree on the role of the influencers, but backed different
approaches when it came to building momentum. One of the approach discussed was to
submit the products to influential websites then hope that enough users will read and share
the message. Another approach was to build on top of the previous approach and create an
integrated marketing campaign, perhaps using mass media campaigns to get maximum
exposure (Gilchrist 2011). Finally, one interviewee talked about identifying influencers with
worldwide network of other influencers covering all online channels, and leveraging that
network to build momentum (Burnett 2011).

I believe that companies need to look at all the options available to them. All approaches
identified in the primary and secondary research seemed logical. A particular approach that
a company adopts would perhaps depend on the combination of the following factors -
product type, the specific markets for the product, the channels where the key influencers
are and whether they have personal network of other influencers in the relevant market,
and the financial resources available to the marketing team – e.g. mass media marketing is
much more costly that social media marketing.

Once the campaign is launched, the interviewees believed that channels in each market
need to be monitored for the spread of the message (Herbison & Armitage 2011). This is
done using a variety of free or paid tools for each channel within each market. For example,
Google Analytics could be used to monitor the number of clicks to a website, but a
completely different tool was used to measure the number of users a tweet would reach, or
how many retweets did the message get on Twitter.

The research suggests that conversations on the relevant channels also need to be
monitored for positive or negative feedback. Reward positive feedback, if possible, even if it
is with a simple acknowledgement - it will buy customer loyalty. Monitoring the network for
any negative feedback and managing customers perception when it happens was also
highlighted as crucial, especially the rogue elements, for instance competitors, trying to
spread negative feedback (Gilchrist 2011). One of the interviewee suggested that companies
should have crisis management strategy in place to be able to deal with such things
effectively (Gilchrist 2011). However, all interviewees felt that this can be very resource
hungry task and most companies only really engage in a selection of channels with the
customers (Dargavel 2011) (Herbison & Armitage 2011).

The research also shows that the measurements of sentiments – Netnography (Kozinets
2010) - in the online networks is quite a complex and tricky subject, and the tools available
to do this kind of analysis are far from perfect (Herbison & Armitage 2011). These tools
involve scraping relevant data from the conversations customers have on online channels.
The analysis of this data is still quite primitive in that it cannot deal with the variation in
dialects, cultural variations in meaning of words, language variations, and slang to name a
few. This means a lot of this analysis requires manual manipulation of data which is very

time consuming and expensive. Hence, the companies use netnographic analysis for very
simple things like brand mentions.

In terms of measuring the Return on Investment the interviewees felt that it is quite a
simple process for digital products as you can measure the number of downloads and
compare it with message spread, and the cost of running the campaign (Dargavel 2011).

Having a Plan B, in case the seeding fails, was seen as quite important campaign
management tool. This could be another set of seeds or a different spin on the product or
perhaps a mass media marketing campaign.

5.8 Sustainability

Every company’s dream is a sustained high growth of their products. Since viral marketing
could potentially provide a means of sustaining exponential growth over a long period of
time, it is quite a lucrative concept. Even though the interviewees thought sustaining the
level of growth that come from a successful viral marketing campaign is theoretically
possible, say by repeating brilliance time and time again (Gilchrist 2011), being able to this
practically was very hard (Burnett 2011) (Gilchrist 2011). The research seems to tilt in favour
of creating campaigns to increase the average growth over a longer period instead.

5.9 Summary

As social media and social networking is such a new concept, companies are finding it quite
hard to come to terms with the fact that it is more than just something social, that social
networks are valuable places where customers interact with each other and communicate
their opinions about brands. These online social networks are extensions of real world social
networks (Dye 2000). In the real world influencers used to, and still, play an important role
in spreading word about a product (Kozinets et al. 2010). They put their reputation on the
line when they do so and hence they have to make sure that products are of top quality.


Such is the case with online product marketing, the only difference being the influencers can
now be found writing blogs, freelance articles, reviewing products, tweeting their opinions
etc.

Just like strategy is important in creating word-of-mouth campaigns in the real world, it is
also important in social media space. As companies become aware of the importance of the
social media, the impact it can have on company’s brand, and the opportunity it provides,
they are slowly beginning to include social media as part of their overall business and
marketing strategy.

Marketers need to consider viral marketing on social media like any another marketing
channel. They also need to develop integrated marketing strategy in order to decide how
best to make use of mass media marketing and social media marketing to have the
maximum predictable reach (Watts, Peretti & Frumin 2007).

Due to the nature of viral marketing on social media i.e. the potential of rapidly attracting
millions of customers without limited geographical boundaries, companies need to closely
consider their capabilities.

Viral messages by their nature are very hard to control when they go truly viral. Marketers
need to be prepared for both positive and negative feedback on the product – making sure
there are enough people in the company, with clearly defined roles and responsibilities,
who are ready to deal with both positive and negative feedback from a viral marketing
campaign. As much as the positive feedback could potentially put the company on the path
of exponential growth, the negative feedback on a viral campaign has the potential to
damage a company’s reputation irrevocably. Companies need to have a crisis management
strategy in place in case something does go wrong.

Companies also need to make sure their systems are capable of dealing with the sudden
increase in traffic to their servers if a viral marketing campaign does become successful.

The quality of product itself has to be exceptional when planning to include viral marketing
campaign as part of the overall marketing campaign. Viral messages are usually spread by
influencers, and influencers usually would not put their reputation on line within their


Viral marketing of digital products using social media - MBA Dissertation

Viral marketing of digital products using social media - MBA Dissertation

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