How To Create A Viral Social Media Campaign

Social Media Marketing or ‘buzz’ marketing allows your company to create conversations in a targeted market segment, facilitating greater brand awareness, thus adding measurable value to your brand.

Traditional advertising is static, the motivation is generally not changing. It may take Coke 9 months from first thought to actually launching a traditional media campaign. Welcome to the 21st Century, ‘real time’, always on – advertising. Social Media does not sleep, ever! If it takes you more than 4 hours to 2 days to fine tune your message, you missed ‘the moment’ to maximize potential for your campaign.

Social Media campaigns are more than just the latest fad. To launch a successful social media campaign, you must have a firm knowledge of who you want to influence and the emotions you need to connect with for target audience engagement. Connect with the public in ways that facilitate them wanting to get involved and continue the conversation without you.

‘Viral Marketing‘ occurs when a message explodes like wildfire.

The faster it spreads, the greater the impact. Combining today’s technology with real-time data shortens the development curve drastically and up front investment. Marketers can take chances and jump at opportunities of the moment like never before.

A new playing field calls for new rules. Impressions used to be king. Today it is more than just views, it’s about the measurement of engagement, real-time data. How are people connecting with your content? Use your data to understand how people are interacting with your content in a direction that continues the conversation. How many retweets occurred? Emails to friends from your content? All readily available tools and metrics.

A perfect example is the recent debacle on the Tonight Show with Conan O’brien. He was in dispute with NBC because they wanted to give the host position back to Jay Leno and remove him, due to no fault of his own. Create a simple flash animation of ‘Talk show Host Shooting Gallery’ sponsored by your company. Pick from Jay Leno or Conan O’brien, reach a certain score and maybe it will unlock David Letterman and Oprahs’ voice could be the announcer. Bam, overnight hit!

The trending topic on twitter was Jay and Conan, market your flash to that audience, next your animation becomes the trending topic. Tomorrow night all of the talk shows mention it and some even show it. By the following morning, the news becomes how your companies animation is sweeping the net, TV and Social Media, driving a % of traffic back to you, creating brand awareness and recognition. Possibly even Oprah will give it a plug on her show as well.

Trends in buzz, viral and word-of-mouth marketing are now tracked and monitored to further refine their marketing strategies. Success means being ready to jump into the fray quickly and strike while the topic is ‘HOT’. Google Search indexing predicted the release of the latest round of MacBooks and iMacs based on minute Apple advertising activity it picked up worldwide weeks before Apple announced anything publicly. When Google Search begins predicting stocks and Superbowl winners weeks early, then we have a problem.

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