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Hans de Kretser celebrates the impact of personalised viral marketing campaigns.

If youre reading this because you want to join the army of people with white wires trailing from their ears, then maybe youre the kind of person who would forward an email to a friend in the hope of winning an iPod. You know its unlikely that youll win, but it wont cost you anything to try a few seconds of your time. You wont win an iPod here Im afraid it was a cheap attention-grabbing way to make a point.

Last year, Dance Touring Partnership presented the 2005 UK tour of Australian Dance Theatre. Working with Tiffany Evans, who co-ordinated the marketing, we produced a trailer to promote the show one of many weve worked on over the years. (You can see it at http://www.adttour.co.uk/eflier). The trailer is a 45-second clip of animation, photographs, marketing copy and music, designed to capture the essence of the performances, and we promoted it to email lists and on websites. However, this isnt viral marketing in itself: it is what happens at the end of the trailer that makes it viral as people are encouraged to forward it on to a friend with, in this case, the chance to win an Apple iPod. They enter their name and email address and their friends name and email address and click send. A plain text email is promptly despatched to the friend with a link to the trailer, a personal message from the friend and information about the performances.

This forwarding mechanism is built into the functionality of the trailer so that the viral response can be monitored and evaluated. It wouldnt be so easy to evaluate if people just forwarded an email using their normal email software. Amongst many other things, we can track who sent the email and to whom they sent it. For example, the Australian Dance Theatre trailer was forwarded on to an extra 800 people who probably wouldnt have seen it unless a friend had recommended it to them.

Ultimately, unless a message is simple to forward on, its unlikely to go viral. However, from this and other cases, weve learnt about a number of other elements that contribute to viral success. The ability to include a personal message gives the sender a chance to give an independent endorsement of your show this is about peer-to-peer marketing and the trust someone has in a friends recommendation. Seth Goddings books on viral marketing and permission marketing(1) accentuate the importance of the incentive (in this case, the iPod) as a motivating factor. An incentive should be appropriate to the target audience so that it complements the marketing message.

One more tip is to maximise the viral response by suggesting that people forward the email on to more than one person. This sounds obvious but can be easily missed when the focus has been on creating something fun and exciting for people to watch. Our method is to point out that the more friends people forwarded it on to, the more opportunities they would have to win the prize but we also say that they should send it to people they know are happy to receive the email. Combined, these elements have really increased the marketing reach of each viral campaign. For example, Dance Touring Partnerships current campaign for Jasmin Vardimons Park (http://www.parktour.co.uk/trailer) has seen a 20% increase on the viral response before the campaign has even finished, compared with the Australian Dance Theatre trailer that didnt encourage sending to multiple people.

As well as monitoring when and how often the trailer is forwarded on, we track how people found the trailer was it because someone had forwarded it on to them? Was it from a link in an email? Or was it because they had seen a link on a website? For Australian Dance Theatre, we tracked which theatres had more success in promoting the e-trailer. We can also track how many people who were originally sent the trailer then sent it on to a friend. And how many of those friends sent it on to another friend and so on.

Not all campaigns will be successful: there are plenty of examples where the viral response rates are low. In general, however, what Ive learnt is in line with what I heard at an Interactive Advertising Bureau debate on Viral Marketing: it generally doesnt happen on its own but as a result of careful planning in bringing all the above elements together.

Hans de Kretser is an independent e-marketing consultant for the arts.
w: http://www.dekretser.com

Further information
Viral and Buzz Marketing Association: http://www.vbma.net
Word Of Mouth Marketing Association: http://www.womma.org
Interactive Advertising Bureau, UK: http://www.iabuk.net

http://www.thesubserviantchicken.com: an old and silly viral game.

(1) Unleashing the Ideavirus (2002) and Permission marketing (1999), Free Press.