Viral media is a flawed way to think about distributing content through informal or “ad hoc” networks of consumers and the harsh reality is that advertisers completely fail to understand the process whereby a content is redistributed over the web. Thus, and in sharp contrast with what they claim, advertisers are completely clueless about how to build a viral marketing campaign and completely ignore what metrics should be deployed to measure their viral campaigns effectiveness.
Photo credit: Kheng Ho Toh
Nevertheless, advertisers are so fascinated by the “concept” of viral marketing, that they are planning to spend increasingly greater budgets to start online viral marketing campaigns (eMarketer reports an estimated $1.4 billion in 2011 that advertisers will spend to place ads on social networking sites).
[…] the idea of the meme and the media virus, of self-replicating ideas hidden in attractive, catchy content we are helpless to resist - is a problematic way to understand cultural practices.
At the root of this, there are two major misconceptions about viral marketing:
- Viral content is something that gets published on the Internet and then spreads spontaneously like a virus.
- People that find content interesting and meaningful for them or their social circle, proactively redistribute it using the Internet.
Talking about memes and viral media places an emphasis on the replication of the original idea, which fails to consider the everyday reality of communication - that ideas get transformed, repurposed, or distorted as they pass from hand to hand, a process which has been accelerated as we move into network culture.
So, what makes a campaign really “viral” is not so much its ability to “be shared and re-transmitted” by as many people as possible, but the potential it has of being “repurposed“, “re-adapted” by the largest number of people in the largest number of new contexts.
Rather than emphasizing the direct replication of “memes“, a spreadable model assumes that the repurposing and transformation of media content adds value, allowing media content to be localized to diverse contexts of use.
In this highly comprehensive and in-depth guide, MIT Professor Henry Jenkins and his team illustrate in simple terms how and what makes something “viral” as well as explain the dynamics that govern the social redistribution of your content across the web.
Here all the details:
