Soften up: mobile viral needs a new approach

Brands love viral marketing. Dreaming up an idea that’s so compelling everybody must want to tell all of their friends, is the ultimate. Provide a little incentive, or sprinkle some creative fairy dust, and watch it spread.

Online has strong viral foundations, and since the early days of the net we have readily sent pages to friends, spread news about the latest cool site or passed on discount vouchers. Users have proved very willing to pass on their friends’ email addresses. Facebook has become the most fertile viral community yet, and there are now over 100 million installations of over 3,000 different widget applications. Most are spread virally as we woo our friends with flowers, zombies and compatibility tests.

These online viral initiatives have mostly been hard virals; in other words an idea which places the brand at the centre of the process. They capture friends of friends’ email addresses and are great for database building and campaign tracking.

Applying this ‘hard viral’ technique is proving much more challenging on mobile. It is such a personal medium that users are reluctant to pass on their friends’ numbers.

The true power for mobile viral is a soft viral, where one user simply shows another the brand’s collateral on their handset, or better still ‘side-loads’ - copying between handsets via Bluetooth or IR or loading from a memory card or across a wire from your PC - using Bluetooth, IR or even P2P text.

A fine example is this: to support the release of Sacha Baron-Cohen’s Borat movie, ‘Borat Makes Release on Mobile’ was created. Users could simply download some of the best clips from the film to their handsets. The great strength of this idea was the soft viral effect: fans had a sixty second clip of the latest hot movie that they could share.

Another case in point is the Collect & Share application launched by the BBC at Mela, the Asian music festival. The application, built by Future Platforms, is seeded using bluetooth stations and gives the users access to the first part of a collection of cool music content. To unlock the next piece of content the user must Bluetooth the previous to another user. The content is cool, the method in simple and unobtrusive, and the soft viral spreads very easily.

There are of course exceptions of hard viral activity succeeding on mobile, and one such exception is the Royal Navy’s getthemessage.net, which was built by Glue London with a little assistance on the mobile side from Sponge. The Royal Navy wanted to publicise the variety of roles available through a series of online video clips featured on the site. Users choose the video clip that most interests them, type in a personal message and send a video to their friend’s mobile which is overlaid with their personal message. It’s technically very cool, fun, and being warmly received by users. It’s also scooped a hat-full of awards.

With soft viral, the downside is that you can’t track users’ actions and you don’t build databases - sacrilege to a generation of marketers raised on the internet. But mobile is not the web, it’s different and it’s the key to harassing the power of the social network; we don’t take our laptops into social situations, we take our mobiles.

Brand owners need to create compelling bite-size content and then relax their grip. Let your brand champions do their work and the content will spread.

Dan Parker

Creative Director

Sponge

www.spongegroup.com