The Viral Marketing Con

Ask anybody to describe viral marketing to you, and they will tell you that you post an article or video which results and thousands of people sharing it, maybe hundreds of thousands, which in turn theoretically at least results in a dramatic increase in your product sales. Most people are under the mistaken impression that it works something like this.

I like your post and share with two or three friends, and they share with two or three friends, who share with two or three friends who then don’t bother to do anything. In fact, it’s highly unlikely that I would even get the second or third person to share it with two or three friends, but that’s how most people think it works. Certainly, what I just described is a positive event, but it’s been proven that that’s really not how viral marketing ever works.

How viral marketing works is that some person with a massive following like Gary Vaynerchuk says nice things about your product or company. You get interviewed on CNN about your product or company. You’re a guest speaker and event with 5,000 important people. The CEO of a major corporation recommends your book in his blog, as Bill Gates did with Ray Dalio’s book Principles. Which to be honest, I didn’t think much of. But then again he’s a billionaire investor so it must’ve been good.

The success of the book 50 Shades of Gray is a great case in point. This book is, without a doubt, one of the worst books I’ve ever read, and yet it’s made the author a billionaire. How did this happen, one housewife at a time texting a friend telling how great this book was until millions and millions of people were texting each other to buy the book? Well, it could happen that way theoretically but didn’t. In fact, it never does.

The author was involved in an amateur book group where some 250,000 people online swapped stories and helped each other. She already had a large following of amateur writers when she published the book. It’s a lot easier to go viral when you’re connected to 250,000 people who already know you from your frequent posts, rather than the 1,500 people most people have on their Facebook page, of which they know less than 200.

Most of the things that do go viral are rubbish and have nothing to do with any given brand for increasing the sales of any product. Another thing you have…

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