GO HYPER-VIRAL ON LAUNCH DAY

Ummm, no, this is NOT viral marketing, but it could be just plain viral. Wash your hands.

Ready to Launch?

Go Hyper-Viral and Get Noticed NOW!

Viral marketing has been around for thousands of years. It’s nothing more than word of mouth marketing (WOM), but with the advent of the world wide web (W3), viral has taken on a nuanced cachet of subversion – exploiting the system. How cool is that?

Through the centuries, WOM was just that. One person told another who told another about this book or that technology and word spread. It was self-perpetuating. As the band of “in-the-know” individuals expanded, naturally WOM expanded with it.

Today, within the ferocious sphere of e-commerce, viral marketing has changed tactics but the premise is still based on word of mouth. Today viral marketing includes:

• blog posts on topics of a site owner’s expertise with a back link to the poster’s site

• uploading product “how-tos,” movie trailers and endorsements to YouTube and other sites that rely on user-generated content

• syndicating articles to other web sites, providing a back link

• creating connectivity within a smaller, niche market (building a weblet; see below)

• posting to Wiki sites to establish authority within a market or commercial sphere

There are other viral tactics. Create a billboard on MySpace and Facebook pointing to your site; sign up as an expert on Yahoo Answers; list services on sites like Craigslist; make your site book-markable by providing visitors the option to ping you at sites like digg and other social book marking sites. Digital technology has changed the tactics of viral, word of mouth advertising, spreading the news globally in just seconds. We’ve come a long way fast.

Hyper-Viral Marketing

Hyper-viral marketing employs new technologies to expand WOM exponentially. It’s taken a few years for the technology to catch up with demand but today, web site owners have a number of tools and tactics at their disposal to simplify and automate the process of building word of mouth webuzz.

When blogs got hot at the turn of the millennium, posting to one blog at a time wasn’t efficient, though site owners who recognized the viral aspects of this marketing tactic did, indeed, take the time to do just that. Cut and paste. Cut and paste. Over and over.

Now, software tools, like Feedburner are available to automate the process of blog posting. Using this tool and others like it makes it simpler to post content on remote sites, to measure readership and placement of syndicated content and blog posts, to maintain metrics on subscriptions to newsletters, podcasts and other interest-generating content.

Google recently purchased Feedburner. As of the day of this writing, this software was feeding 870,764 publishers (site owners like you) with 1,549,103 distinct feeds.

Feedburner is an excellent example of a tool that has been developed to turn viral marketing into hyper-viral marketing – automatically.

Facebook Goes Hyper Viral

Ever since Facebook launched and social sites went viral, online businesses have employed the resources of these sites to create some free biz buzz. It’s easy to create a digital billboard for your business on Facebook, which makes it an ideal viral marketing tool.

The social website has recently gone hyper-viral with the addition of its “People You May Know” feature. This addition increases the utility of Facebook as a viral outlet by enabling users to search for quality contacts by geography, specialty, schools attended and so on. The idea is to create smaller communities within the larger Facebook universe.

For site owners, the addition of this feature to an already valuable viral marketing tool increases the utility of the site. However, your Facebook space may have to be revisited. New content to attract Facebook’s site search bots can easily be added to link up with old business acquaintances, classmates, neighbors and so on. The result? A higher quality of contact within the Facebook/social site model.

Blog Directories

Blogs are a great way to go hyper viral fast, especially if you post provocative, controversial and bleeding edge content. Getting your blog picked up, however, is another matter. You can submit to blogs but there’s no guarantee that the blogmaster is going to give you some space without something in return – a blog bribe in the W3 trade.

Blog directories build credibility and make it much easier to find your posts. To list your blog, visit toprankblog.com for an extensive list of blog directories. Using automated technology and current blog posting software, you can access dozens of weblog directories and list your blog with a few clicks.

As blogs take on a more significant role in reporting news, identifying trends and shaping opinions and buying decisions, their importance as a hyper viral marketing tool increases. That means good content. Buzz-worthy content. Sites like Spike.com provide a lot of provocative content. (Word of caution: Spike contains content that may not be suitable for all users so be forewarned. Some of the stuff on the site is crude, salacious and downright weird, but that’s the whole point of provocative content.)

Schemes, Scams, Disputes and Deceptions

Whenever a new technology is developed, there are schemers, scammers and other neer-do-wells out to subvert the process and take advantage of the unwitting so tread slowly in this new age of hyper-viral marketing. The snake oil salesman is knocking on the door. Make sure you know what you’re paying for, what you’re getting into and what kind of measurable results you can anticipate. Oh, and does it come with any kind of guarantee?

There are blogging services and press release syndicators that “guarantee” that you’ll get posted on 10,000 blogs within 24 hours. You gotta question the editorial judgment involved in posting to appropriate blogs. Your erudite musings on the Chaos Theory may end up on an anarchist site in Columbia. Be careful. These services are automated and the results aren’t always what’s anticipated.

Oh, and are you going to take the time to determine how many blogs really got your post. Any busy blogger has enough filters on the incoming chute to keep mass mailings headed straight for the DELETE FOREVER file. The finality of the deletion is indisputable. It’s gone without so much as a look. But the PR distributor delivered on its promise by delivering your release to 10,000 sites. What’s more difficult to measure is how many opened the PR and how many ran it on their sites or blogs.

Take care when writing a check for services that are amorphous and difficult, if not impossible, to quantify. If you don’t know how success is measured using a distribution service, man, you got the wrong service.

Also, be wary of “hyper-viral” software coming to market. Some early 1.0 editions are buggy, some over-promise and under deliver and some make promises that may not synch up with your site or server side software. For example, there are several software developers selling RSS to blog software. One of the things that has held back the explosive use of RSS on the web is the hassles of aggregating, monitoring and getting the collected feeds before the site visitor in a meaningful, useful way.

These software packages and associated support services make hyperbolic claims of instant wealth and fame by filling blogs with your RSS feeds. Google “RSS to blog” and enjoy the battle of what works, what’s a scam and what’s worth further exploration.

You Gotta Go Hyper But Not Be Hyper

There are hyper viral tools like Feedburner (and lots of other blogger distribution software; Feedburner isn’t the only one) podcast and webcast syndication software (growing quickly), automated PR software, newsletter software and a bunch of other spam to hit the fan as hyper viral goes hyper viral – starting now.

Take your time. Choose which outlets will deliver bang for buck, which can be measured with specificity and analyzed in a useable format, which players want your money and which want to help by providing a truly potent service or software that makes spreading the word about your site easier, more automated, more targeted and even more personalized.

Hey, before you launch that site - your web dream - drop me a line or give me a call. You can get free pixels outta the chute. It's a snap.

Webwordslinger.com