McNutt Against the Music

As regular readers are well aware, my brother Myles runs the television-oriented blog Cultural Learnings. His blog has a much higher readership than mine, in part because of his more-targeted focus and in part because he’s done a really great job reaching out to the online television community. He posts on message boards, reads other blogs, and openly engages in the digital conversation. His efforts are a perfect example of successful social media.

Unfortunately, somebody neglected to explain social media to CBS. In a post this past weekend, Myles calls out “viral marketers” who have been posting in his comments promoting the network’s new (and poorly reviewed) fall comedies. These efforts are absolutely laughable, foolishly transparent, and downright insulting to anyone’s intelligence. I shudder to think that it might actually be an advertising agency hired by CBS who is engaging in such tomfoolery.

Myles isn’t the only one frustrated with so-called “viral marketing.” Mitch Joel – you may remember him from my Second Life theorizing – posted his own call-to-arms at his Twist Image blog last week. Tired of clients asking him to make something “go viral,” Joel pins down exactly where the problem lies:

We don’t offer Viral Marketing as a service and I don’t think anybody with a shred of professionalism in the Digital Marketing space should even promote the fact that they can… because they can’t. Viral Marketing is not a form of marketing, so we should stop calling it Viral Marketing. Viral is an effect. It’s a strategic by-product of a successful campaign that resonated with a group of people. You can’t create viral… and those who say they can are simply collecting data of people who do tend to forward things on or Blog about them, as if “seeding” that group is viral success… it is not.

Joel makes an astute comparison to his past life in the music industry when he says that asking a marketer to make something go viral is “like asking a musician to write a one hit wonder.” A record company can do everything in its power to try and force a radio single down listeners’ throats, but unless the audience likes what they hear, they’re not going to send it up the chart.

The same principles apply in the advertising and marketing world, perhaps the only industry more obsessed with self-definition and nomenclature than the music industry. “Viral marketing” is another one of its meaningless, redundant terms; it signifies nothing more than old-fashioned word of mouth, facilitated by the communications technologies of a new digital age. And no matter how much bullshit they may spew, no marketer has ever produced one ounce of word-of-mouth. The audience creates word-of-mouth.

If a company or organization truly wants something to “go viral,” they have to start by creating something worth sharing. They need to make sure that their product or service is something valuable or unique enough that people will want to tell their friends, family and coworkers about. Or, if that product or service is similar to the competition, they can create advertising or promotional materials worth showing to others (as Blendtec and Dove have done brilliantly). These principles apply whether you’re seeking to create word-of-mouth in the digital or non-digital world, the difference being that the former allows audiences to share and recommend content on an unprecedented scope.

The reason why CBS is resorting to an embarrassing attempt at “viral marketing” is that they don’t have anything worth telling people about. They’ve got duds on their hands, television pilots that are flopping with critics and gaining no legitimate buzz online. They’ve thrown their hopes behind “viral marketing” (which their advertising agency has interpreted to mean “comment spamming”) in the faint hope of making lemonade out of their lemons. Unfortunately, the audience they’re trying to reach just isn’t thirsty.