Why your viral campaign will fail

You want a viral campaign. This is the golden nugget of earned media. And to say that your viral campaign will fail would be misleading. Truth is, I reckon it has about a 0.001% potential of success.

This is why my estimate is a fairly accurate one:

The two sides of potential

The first way to see the potential of something is to use a bell curve; where you take the law of averages and see what the probability is that you will succeed. Using this it’s very easy to say (with accuracy) that we won’t see a 20 foot man walking down the streets – well not in our lives.

The other way is based on the idea the long tail. This is how knowledge and ideas work. Let’s take books sales. JK Rowling will collectively sell more books than next 1000, or even 10 000 people next to her.

Successful Viral Campaigns

A viral campaign is the idea of the long tail, yet in reverse. Chris Anderson has explained the way information is mapped on the internet. The long tail looks at a historical view, and it does not behave in the way of a bell curve.

A viral campaign is the opposite side of the coin. It looks forward and has the opposite mapping to the long tail and works in the opposite direction.

The principle is very simple: If we look at Google, books sales on Amazon or any other distribution pattern online, about there is a very strong clustering of ideas in the fat head.

So we may find the term Barack Obama will be searched for 1.2 odd million time a month. Yet the Jacob Zuma (South African president) will be searched 33 odd thousand times per month. This is the same pattern with book s sales. Dan Brown’s Da Vinci code will sell 1000′s more than some obscure author who wrote the alchemical and mystical properties of copper.

This is how ideas work. It’s how they are distributed. They do not behave like a bell curve.

A viral campaign is a forward looking idea. You are trying to get a whole lot of people to adopt your idea, to get excited about and spread it for all its worth. You are trying to get earned media for free.

Humans are not radical

Yet as humans our behaviour is not that radical. Most of us do not wake up in the morning looking for viral campaigns to promote. We wake up and share what is totally relevant to us and that we feel worth sharing. We would not consider 99% of what we see worthy of sharing.

So where does that leave the agency promoting the idea of a viral campaign and trying to get earned media?

Did you hear about the 1000 failures for the 1 success?

No you did not. Your agency did not tell you. And this does not leave you in a good spot. They are lying to you; misleading you if they tell you they can get you a viral campaign. They want is your money and you take it to them with the expectation of success.

They tell you that they can do it. They tell you that you are going to get the results you expect. They are saying, with 100% certainly that they will do it for you. Even if it was a 50% certainty it would be misleading.

You see the real problem here is we see an old spice campaign that worked but we do not see the 1000′s that did not. We see the potential of the old spice campaign and start to salivate. We start to believe that earned media is easy to get

But if we had to look at this based on a real risk analysis, would you risk your money for a 1/1000 potential return on your money. No, I doubt, I would not.