Rand Fishkin is a popular speaker at search engine optimization conferences – not so much for his trademark yellow sneakers – but for his direct and uncompromising advocacy of social media marketing. His strategy is to focus on the ‘linkerati’, the new breed of bloggers whose approval is often the first stage in launching a successful campaign, and he insists the quickest way to kill a viral campaign is by giving it to your public relations department. Fishkin explains his approach and gives top tips on social media marketing.
Key points
- Viral content can present itself in a variety of media - a blog post, a video, a diagram, a photograph or an article. What is important is that it is easy to spread and that it attracts the right type of audience.
- Tap into the 'linkerati', a community who have the maximum potential to spread your content. This could be through posting about it on a forum, writing a blog or linking to it; or voting for it on Reddit, Del.icio.us, or Digg. They could also email it to their friends or text message it through Twitter.
- Intelligent search campaigns use keywords appropriately in the link text, headlines, tags and the viral content itself i.e. blog post, podcast and video caption.
- Don't let your PR department kill your story. Compelling content can be turned into something that looks and sounds like everything else because of an over zealous use of communications guidelines.
Many marketers smile wryly at the thought of bygone days when innovative direct marketing consisted of women arranging Tupperware parties in their local neighborhoods - but for Rand Fishkin, CEO and co-founder of SEOmoz (www.seomoz.org), this is where the first brick of Social Media Marketing was laid.
Fishkin, who has quickly become an industry leader thanks to an award-winning SEO blog, says the widespread popularity and the ease with which Social Media Marketing (SMM) performs is relatively new, but that the practice itself is "just an expansion of something like Tupperware parties in the 1950s."
He goes on to explain, "People were getting together in a real space instead of an online space to share things, so that’s the first instance that I can think of of SMM - but I’m sure it happened before that."
If a marketer successfully executes an SMM campaign it can go viral, meaning it will spread rapidly across the internet through social media platforms like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Squidoo etc, where your brand will get maximum exposure.
Fishkin pauses for a moment and then somewhere in his brain he extracts a comparison that really tops it - Picasso was the first viral marketer!
"If you're an art lover I’m sure you would say Picasso was doing viral marketing in the Paris Salons by having one piece shown which would make an impact, thereby leading people to want more. In essence you are doing the same thing - viral content - or in this case a painting, is being put out there where your peers are, where everyone is collecting, and you know people are going to be paying attention to what's produced.
"The principle is old but the medium is what makes it possible for companies large and small to engage in it." Within just a few minutes of talking to Fishkin it’s easy to see why he is so successful. His company has attracted considerable attention from the likes of the Washington Post, Newsweek and USA Today. He’s also a regular on the SEO conference circuit where he dons his trademark bright yellow sneakers. He says this is because ‘techies’ never remember faces, so when he’s in town, you only have to remember his shoes.
SEOmoz is a consultancy firm offering internet marketing and search engine optimization services. Their goal, they say, is to educate clients so that “they can best leverage the unique reach of the internet.”
Fishkin thinks it’s time to take a leaf out of Picasso’s book and go viral. By establishing good content for your product, viral marketing campaigns offer a solution to companies who want to stand out from the crowd.
Fishkin says: “Viral content when it comes to web marketing could be a blog post, a video, a diagram, an article, a photograph - any number of different mediums can be used to convey viral content. What is important is that it is easy to spread and that it attracts the right type of audience.” Fishkin has dubbed this audience the “linkorati’, a community who have the maximum potential to spread your content.
“They are very good at taking content they enjoy and spreading it throughout the internet - that could be through posting about it on a forum, writing a blog or linking to it, voting for it on Reddit, Del.icio.us, or Digg; or they could email it to their friends or text message it through Twitter.”
Although Fishkin and his team brainstorm ideas for viral content and create what they feel is a good package, he admits they have to "strike out" a few times before they meet success.
"With our clients, our process has always been to guarantee that we will get three stories popular over the next three months. If we blog something and it doesn’t work we try again until we get a success."
Fishkin’s advice on how to avoid a catastrophic campaign is controversial - he says businesses should bypass their Public Relations Departments.
"Every time you give your PR department content to edit, I promise you the content will not go viral - your PR department will rip the soul out of it.
"That’s a big problem for a lot of large companies. They have processes they need to go through, and anything that goes on the website has to go through PR and content quality checks - those things can ruin what would have been an incredibly insightful, cool piece of data. Something really compelling will be turned into something that looks and sounds like everything else because a PR department got their hands on it."
Good examples of viral marketing campaigns, in Fishkin’s eyes, have been video game producers World of Warcraft and technology giants, Apple.
World of Warcraft launched an international campaign where they produced video advertisements where actors like Jean-Claude Van Damme and Verne Troyer (Mini Me from Austin Powers films) talked about the characters they played in the game. "They have hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube for their videos, so you’re talking about reaching millions of people through the natural spread of this content," says Fishkin.
Apple’s advert where two men acting as a PC and a Mac talking back and forth is, to Fishkin, "a perfect example where the content is created for advertising and becomes a viral campaign with social media around it."
This emerging style of campaign has presented modern-day marketers and advertisers with a real challenge. It is no longer necessary nor viable to sit in boardrooms discussing what the ad’s jingle should sound like or how to communicate the product‘s benefits.
Fishkin says that in the last five years we have entered into "a very different scenario" where marketers need to think about applying content which is going to "spread the brand further and wider than what we paid for in advertising".
Companies don’t have to go down the route of Apple or World of Warcraft with online videos; as Fishkin has already pointed out, blogging is a great way to create viral content. He sites Guy Kawasaki, John Chow and Techcrunch as sources of viral content, but even outside these more obvious realms, Fishkin says he has recently seen blogs on scrapbooking go viral.
Adopting viral content and SMM within traditional marketing approaches is fast becoming a necessity for businesses. Fishkin says it is a "low investment, high return package" but provides a caveat - it needs a knowledgeable person at the helm.
"The only way this works is with someone who is intimately familiar with the blogosphere, has considerable experience promoting content and can see what works, so that they will be able to predict success.
"In saying that, hundreds of unpredictable stories, videos and pieces of work go viral every week. It’s a hard thing to predict but from a business viewpoint it’s something you must try to engage in," Fishkin adds.
Tips from Rand Fishkin on social media marketing and how to make content go viral
- Research. Find out who in your industry has had success in this area, and of course who has failed. How have they made it work? Talk to your peers to find how they went about launching viral content and discuss it with marketing professionals who have experience.
- Brainstorm. Getting ideas together at this stage will be a lot easier because you already know what works. Pick some of the best ideas, execute them and show them to a sample audience such as a group of friends, or people you think can be critical of you.
- The Big Push. If your audience is ready to spread it then you have to come up with a strategy that will push the content out. This can be done by emailing bloggers, submitting it on social media sites, talking about it on your own blog, posting a Twitter on it, emailing influential friends. If you can take a campaign wide once or twice, the next time you produce something you won’t have to push it as hard because the audience already recognizes you. It will spread naturally.
- Only kill content if you are getting negative feedback or a lot of criticism. Not all publicity is good publicity. You don’t want to become an online laughing stock.
- Even if nothing is happening, leave it out there. Sometimes a year later it will go popular for no particular reason. That’s the great thing about the web - you can put something out there, think it has failed, and a few months later it turns out to be a big hit. It can be down to bad timing, or the right person not seeing it first time round.
- Keyword Research. One of the things we (SEOmoz) always advise our clients is to execute their campaigns intelligently from a search perspective. The links they provide must have the right keywords, and the same thing has to be said when they're optimizing their viral content - such as videos, pod casts, blogs etc.
- Make sure that it’s easy to link to your URL, that you have a link to it, share this, here’s a banner, here’s a badge - ie a piece of content you can talk about. It has to be easy to share and easy to spread.
Make sure the content is kept on your website so that people are linking to your site rather than going to YouTube for videos. Do this to make sure you are earning all the link benefit.
About Rand Fishkin
Rand first became involved with the World Wide Web in 1993 while still in high school, and eventually became a consultant on website usability for small businesses in Seattle.
In 2002 he ventured into the field of search marketing and was soon posting reports, data, and tools in a subfolder that eventually became seomoz.org. Rand is now at the helm of what is arguably one of the most influential search marketing companies in the world, which has also led him to become a highly sought after conference speaker.
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