OUGD406 Studio Brief 02 Research into Viral Marketing Methods

1. If something is compelling enough, people will share it. You can't force people to share crappy content. Creating compelling content starts with understanding what compels your audience in the first place. What drives the emotions of a male, 18-24 years old? Understanding your target audience, at least in general, is one of the first steps in the content creation process. If your content can trigger emotions in the audience (weather it is joy, humor, etc), then you are in for the money. An article from List25 that triggered a humorous emotion; 31k likes, 1.4M stumbleupon views, 742 RT's etc.
2. Enable frictionless sharing. Simple buttons with recognizable icons is all you need. No need for obnoxious pop-up windows.
3. Facebook drives more traffic than any other social network. Seven times as much as Twitter.
4. Pinterest is on average the 12th largest traffic referring site to viral content. So if you ever do an Infographic make sure you add that Pinterest button! (If you need to make space, dump the Delicious bookmark button – that was nearly useless)
5. If you want to be social, you have to be mobile friendly. 1 in 5 visitors are using a mobile device. Over half of these are iPhones.
6. Sites that are simple or seem "dumb" are anything but, they're accessible. If an idea seems simple, that's great, it means more people will be able to relate to it.
7. Leverage famous names in your industry by interviewing them, or including them in the campaign in some way. This has the benefit of an already engaged audience with that celebrity’s brand, making your content that much more interesting. John Dumas, of Entrepreneur on Fire said that he’s interviewed people like Seth Godin, Gary Vaynerchuk, and 100s of others just by simply reaching out to them to provide them another avenue to promote themselves.
8. Use polarizing subject lines if appropriate. The Pixel Academy had a post in the 'technology' subreddit with the subject line: "Coding should be taught in elementary schools." Within 6 hours, it had gained over approximately twenty thousand votes, over 2000 points (the difference between up and down votes), and 1700 comments - it also made it all the way up to the #1 position in the technology subreddit (which has 2.1 million subscribers) and to the #3 position on the reddit homepage (which every user sees when viewing reddit.com). Janeesa, Digital Marketing Manager Fundable.
9. To capture attention, Aweber conducted a survey of how teens communicate, which they turned into a timely and provocative story for marketers. With Millennials quickly becoming the consumers of tomorrow, knowing their communication preferences is essential. Email is regularly dismissed as a channel not used by teens, but our data showed that teens use it more than Facebook. Even more revealing was the fact that 18% of teens said they would stop communicating altogether if their favorite channel of communication disappeared.
10. Provide an embed code directly beneath the infographic in your blog post for bloggers to quickly post the image on their site. Send an email to your customers and blog subscribers announcing the data and encouraging them to share with others.
11. Make a list of everyone who has some kind of interest in what you want to spread-people who have skin in the game. Do favors for people beforehand (like share their content) as a way to engage reciprocity. The day of release tell all of them, because of the calculus of the exponential spread, the way going viral works is that the wider your starting base, the quicker, and more likely you can go viral. Brad Hines
12.  A tweet from a celebrity - Celebrity endorsement on Twitter is the key ingredient for YouTube video marketing and can set a viral video ablaze – a few retweets can change the lives of many artists. - Larry Kim, Wordstream
13. Make it exclusive - Any offer must not be ubiquitous. If a user has seen the deal before, if it's in the Sunday circular, sharing becomes less appealing. One of the reasons people share is to be that person that shows their friends something for the first time. It's an ego booster.
14. Make it worthwhile - People are not likely to share a 5% off coupon with their friends. It's not worth it. But, you bump it up to 25% and you have something worth sharing (and redeeming).
15. Make it available for a limited time - To motivate social media users to share, you must give a narrow window for the desired action to be performed. An expiration date is key to avoiding procrastination which is followed by inaction. Sean Grace, CoupSmart
16. The content itself must be 100% factual. The Internet is rife with misinformation, so make sure to do sufficient fact-checking. The theme of your article can take one of two standpoints: You can either take a popular opinion and simply expound upon it, or you can take a more controversial or confrontational stance. Either way, your viewers will be motivated to comment and share your post with others. You also need to make sure your topic is relevant and, if possible, related to a current event. For example, a piece on how to financially cope during a recession won’t get nearly as much traffic now as it would have had you written it two or three years ago. Andrew Schrage, co-owner of Money Crashers Personal Finance.
17. Target specific bloggers through GroupHigh, ($3k a year) which aggregates over 10 million blogs and can target the blog content, Klout of blogger, and page rank.  From there, determine which blogs make sense for you to contact. Only contact the blogs that are relevant and most likely to pick up your pieces of content based on their readership, blog history, and niche.
18. There are Q&A sites you can by posting the content as an answer to relevant questions. Sites used most frequently are Yahoo! Answers and LinkedIn. Carrie Peterson, Social Media Director,Internet Marketing Inc.
19. Juice the views. There are a couple of different companies that you can pay to run your video or content piece in their network of high profile sites to increase your content’s page views to a critical point so that it then becomes an organic piece unto itself.
20. http://socialmediatoday.com/adam-torkildson/1038526/top-22-viral-marketing-tactics-you-need-2013

These seem like some really strong pointers for viral campaigns and should stimulate some thought in the others in my group and help to create a strong viral campaign. 

I also found some interesting articles analysing audience reposes to advertising and how and why they might evoke emotions. I would be useful to sit down with everyone else in the group and identify which emotions we want to evoke with our campaign and how this will help us to create content that engages our audience and hopefully makes them share it.

These are the different emotions that are important in creating fascination in our target audience. By isolating one we can make a strong campaign that engages and interests. To me this would be the rebellion reaction, because we need something that is really going to grab and hold attention, and I think risk taking and pushing the boundaries of what people expect would be the way to do this.

1. Passion/Lust

Individuals and companies with the passion trigger make fast connections with others and inspire a close relationship with customers. Do you remember the first time you walked into the Apple store and your mouth started watering over the latest Mac? That was lust. Humans get the same mouth watering physiological effect with food, sex and many other products/services that create an anticipation of pleasure.

For a marketer to use lust Hogshead tells us that you need to tap into the 5 senses; you need to tease people’s passions, to pique their interest. There is a need for constant adaptation as passions can quickly run dry. Be creative.

2. Alarm

Alarm is the instinct we all have that used to keep us alive in more primitive times – the fight or flight instinct – losing your child on a crowded beach or meeting Freddie Kruger late at night. People prefer to avoid problems, so the alarm trigger can be used to show people the negative consequences of inaction in order to inspire a fast action. FedEx has combined trust (another trigger) with alarm (it cannot be late!!) to create a winning business. Marketers should define consequences and then create deadlines. This is all about leveraging fear.

3. Mystique

Mystique is all about holding something back and not revealing it. There is curiosity in lack of fulfillment. Hogshead says that there are 4 ways to trigger mystique: spark curiosity, withhold information, build mythology, and limit access.

Mystique is about telling stories and not giving facts – the secret ingredient in Coca-Cola is hidden in a vault, and according to myth only 2 people know the whole list of ingredients.

4. Power

Sometimes people do not want to be in control; they want to relinquish control to others. A good example of this is the personal trainer at the gym. Another example is a digital marketer. Many small business owners want to concentrate on their core business and delegate their digital marketing to an agency so that they do not have to think about it. Another example is the sommelier at a fancy restaurant. We often relinquish control to others due to their status.

5. Prestige

Prestige is all about perceived respect. People often obsess over symbols of rank and respect. People aim to achieve high standards and tangible evidence of their success; this may be a high salary, a simple thank you or a present/gift. There are great examples of prestige on all supermarket shelves. Why do you pay more for the branded product than the supermarket own brand? Why can a Tiffany engagement ring sell for twice the price of a similar ring? In order to leverage the prestige trigger of fascination you need to limit availability, increase the price so that accessibility is decreased (although you have to live up to the promise in the higher price). This all takes nerves of steel and a long-term investment in your brand.

6. Rebellion/Vice

We all like to break the rules sometimes, to do things differently. Vice is the desire you get when you are told that you cannot have something. Monica Lewinsky managed to launch a handbag line following her flirtation with vice.

Hogshead says that we should start by tweaking established expectations in order to trigger vice. She gives the example that a normally boring electronics company could create a set of headphones with a “road to deafness” volume setting in order to “softly” trigger vice.

7. Trust

Trust comes through familiarity and predictability. Messages should be repeated and retold; they should be consistent, reliable and clear. McDonald’s has trust as their strongest trigger. Personally, I am not a fan but I do trust that I will get what I expect if I were to visit a McDonald’s restaurant. The same goes for Starbucks.

Eliminate all sense of uncertainty, chaos or surprise.

Hogshead’s research helps you to not only understand others, also to understand yourself and your business and how others perceive you. It also helps you to understand how to leverage the triggers of fascination to grow your business.

You can read more on the 7 Triggers of Fascination at Sally’s websitehowtofascinate.com/

I also found this fascination experiment done into the emotions evoked by content and those which most commonly lead to that content being shared. It fits perfectly with the previous list of emotions it is possible to evoke. 

Jonah Berger and Katherine L. Milkman of the Wharton Business School carried out a study titled “Social Transmission, Emotion, and the Virality of Online Content” in 2010.

The research involved studying every article in The New York Times over a 3-month period – a total of 7000 articles. In addition, they ran detailed laboratory controlled experiments with individuals.

The goal was to uncover the emotional sentiment hidden in the articles that were shared the most to see if there were any patterns. Then following this, they used the controlled laboratory experiments to manipulate and measure arousal in humans in order to study how this affected social sharing.

The research paper is well worth a read if you are interested in the psychology of social sharing and the emotions that trigger a viral response, as it will help you to write better blog posts, tweets, Facebook updates, Adwords ads, etc.

What Berger and Milkman found was that:

• Positive content is more viral than negative content (but it is a lot more complex than just this).
• The key to social sharing is the level of arousal of the viewer/reader – the more highly aroused they are (positively or negatively), the more active they are in sharing content; even content that is unrelated to the cause of their mood.
• Positive content that inspires surprise, amusement and awe is shared more.
• Negative content that inspires anger and anxiety is shared more.
• Content that inspires low emotional arousal (sadness) is less viral.
• People share content in the hope that it will raise their social standing, generate reciprocity (i.e. to get something tangible or not in return) and simply to help others.
• https://blog.kissmetrics.com/creating-viral-content/

It has come to my attention that a lot of this is dependent on identifying the target audience, this will just take a while and a lot of talking in our group. Once we have done this, targeting them will be helped by identifying the emotions and reactions we want to evoke, as listed above.