‘Viral’ Marketing: a Strategy or Result?

What does the ‘viral’ in ‘viral marketing’ actually mean?

I’ve recently run into some confusion when talking to the viral and social media marketing crowd. While the issue wears many guises, it boils down to a disagreement regarding the definition of the word ‘viral’ in the term ‘viral marketing’.

Most recently in my own life, the confusion surfaced during both a client discussion and in the comments of my most recent viral marketing post. Both instances of miscommunication occurred for exactly the same reason: I had a different take on the word ‘viral’ than the others involved. This confusion raises a legitimate question: Does the ‘viral’ in ‘viral marketing’ refer to a result or a strategy?

Max Gladwell (@maxgladwell on Twitter), in the comments of a recent PandemicBlog post, pointed out that by referring to Pandemic Labs as a “viral marketing company” we were misleading people and that “Viral is an outcome, not a strategy.” I found this very intriguing for two reasons:

1. I have previously heard the opinion that viral refers to an outcome yet I personally don’t see it that way and have never used it in this manner.
2. He followed up his objections with thoughtful explanation which helped me understand the crux of the issue, understand his argument and question the validity of ‘viral’ being used at all.

As Max pointed out, the term “go viral” is often used to refer to a huge, blowout success; a pandemic. This phrase, more than anything I’ve come across thus far, seems responsible for some of the confusion. As this phrase is equating ‘viral’ with success, Max’s opinion is clearly a legitimate conclusion.

That said, my own understanding of ‘viral’ is distinctly different. To me, ‘viral’ denotes the specific distribution strategy of a piece of online media. Based on the precedent set by other types of marketing (online marketing, television marketing, email marketing, etc), I built my business around the idea that ‘viral’ described the means by which the marketing uses to spread the message.

By my logic, when referring to a viral marketing effort, you know the piece of media will largely be spread around by online word-of-mouth, email and other person-to-person means. Understandably, the viral itself requires person-to-person spread like it’s namesake the biological virus. The individual-to-individual contact inherent to the spread of a virus is the important difference between viral marketing and other forms of “blast the consumer from one source” marketing (television, radio, print, etc).

Viral marketing does not guarantee success. Indeed, there are no forms of marketing or advertising that do. It is simply a newer strategy that has recently become available to marketers that has been named after a pre-existing biological process that it closely resembles. I do not think “viral marketing” should have unreasonable expectations laid on it just because the term “go viral” has gained a certain meaning in our modern lexicon.

My own opinions aside, Max’s point still stands and this leaves us, the marketing community, at a crossroads.

1. Do we standardize on one of these definitions for clarity?
2. Do we recognize going forward the validity of both and make sure to clarify when important?
3. Do we seek another name for this person-to-person type of marketing to avoid the confusion altogether?

Personally, I feel ‘viral’ is an unfortunate but accurate moniker for what we do. The spread of a piece of viral media is very similar to the spread of a biological virus. The similarity lends itself to sharing a name. However, the shared name is what is limiting people’s thinking and causing confusion (this isn’t even taking into account the aversion people have to anything ‘viral, but that’s another post entirely).

When next the marketing community invents a type of marketing, might we give it a name entirely its own and skip the confusion?

Thanks to Max Gladwell for inspiring this post.

I’ll continue the discussion in the comments as usual. I await your thoughts.

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