Be "Buzzworthy"

I think that anyone who runs a website or owns a business will agree that the best form of marketing is viral marketing (essentially word-of-mouth advertising). It is definitely the most cost-effective way to build your business. What influences you more, a commercial advertising a product or an email from a close friend hyping it up?

Becoming buzzworthy has become so desired that there are now marketing firms that specialize in viral marketing. For example, they pay 12 year old girls to tell their friends about the new clothing line/music group/website. Recently, a number of their tactics have come into question. Not to mention that paying to be viral isn't being TRULY viral.

Most people know the story of Hotmail - probably the best example of the power of viral marketing on the web. Hotmail did absolutely no marketing, the only thing they did to promote their service was put a line of text at the bottom of every single email saying "Get your private, free e-mail at http://www.hotmail.com". That's it. People saw the message and signed up for their own account.

I think that most businesses try to be buzzworthy, but the problem is that viral marketing is an extremely inexact science. Predicting what things people will tell all of their friends about and what things they won't is not easy. Personally, I THINK it happens when a site is so unique and pertinent to me AND my friends that I absolutely must tell them. It's usually a pretty unconscious thing so it's hard to be sure.

I have probably tried 200+ things to generate buzz about SportsLizard.com. Some of which have failed, some of which have been moderately successful, but none have generated the kind of buzz that brings hundreds of thousands of visitors in a day. However, this week I had a great (albeit small) exposure to the power of viral marketing.

One of the subsections of SportsLizard.com is focused on re-painting sports figurines to look like your favorite athlete, someone you know, or yourself (known as customs). The hobby has become so popular that hundreds of people sell customs on eBay and on their own websites. The problem is that in many cases they are profiting off of licenses of teams, players, or universities that they don't have permission to be using.

I decided to write an article about the licensing problem and post it in customs news groups and message boards. Literally within MINUTES my inbox was flooded with emails and replies to the article. It was something that all customizers had an interest in and were willing to go to war with each other about. I was thrilled, my article was read hundreds of times in the first few hours!

Now, to put this in perspective, there are probably only a thousand customizers in the world, so there are only about a thousand people who would actually care to read the article. Not enough to be super-buzzworthy, but I got to see the impact of being truly viral on a small scale.

Because it is such an inexact science, I believe the best approach is to try A LOT of different ways to be viral. If you put all of your eggs in one viral-marketing basket, you will probably fail. My educated guess is that it takes anywhere from 100 to 1,000 attempts to spread the word of your product/service to find the technique that inspires people to tell others. It can be frustrating, but you only have to get it right ONCE for your business to take off.