Seth Godin defines viral marketing… not everything viral is marketing. Common sense? Many folks don’t get it.

Something being viral is not, in an of itself, viral marketing. Who cares that 32,000,000 people saw your stupid video? It didn’t market you or your business in a tangible, useful way.

Marketers are obsessed with free media, and, as is often the case, we blow it in our rush to get our share. We create content that is hampered or selfish or boring. Or we create something completely viral that doesn’t do any marketing at all.

To be successful at marketing online, you have to lose all your traditional marketing baggage, that’s one thing. Then you have to make sure you didn’t also lose the mission. I just looked it up, Webster’s has a succinct definition of marketing: to expose for sale in a market.

Viral marketing, Godin says, “is getting a bad name, largely from clueless marketing agencies and clueless marketers.”

Here’s what they do: they get a lame product, or a semi-lame product, and they don’t have enough time or money to run a nationwide ad campaign. So, instead, they slap some goofy viral thing on top of it and wait for it to spread. And if it doesn’t spread, they create a faux controversy or engage a PR firm or some bloggers and then it still doesn’t work.

(Thanks to the Person who tweeted the Godin piece.)

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This entry was posted on Monday, December 22nd, 2008 at 8:36 am and is filed under Interactive Marketing, Markets are Conversations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.