Beyond Viral: 3 ideas for Co-Creative Marketing
So this is some early experimental thinking here so feel free to poke holes, call bullshit, or add your own take in the comments.
I’m using the term co-creative marketing here as I think it’s a better more holistic term than “viral”. I still think viral is a totally valid tactic, but I don’t think it’s a strategy. Viral in most cases is not much better than a 30 second spot except it’s distribution is cheaper, I guess that’s why marketers and advertisers are so generally comfortable with the concept.
For me the concept of co-creative marketing is something that should, at it’s best, be built into the DNA of your products and services. Something that builds tremendous value for you over time, something that ends up building “social equity“.
My working definition of social equity for the moment is: “social equity is built by aggregating, connecting, reflecting and amplifying the all the small user contributions over time so the whole is worth much more than the sum of its parts.” Sort of like network effects, the more people using it and participating the more valuable your product or service.
Anyway, I was thinking about what the necessary components were for co-creative marketing and came up with Shareable, Mashable, and Hackable which i’ll elaborate on a bit here. I think I have a much better idea of what makes something sharable and some nascent ideas on mashable and hackable.
Shareable
Shareable may seem self explanatory, but sometimes it takes effort to create elements of your product or service that are shareable. Easy to share, right size, right format, WORTH SHARING. YouTube is probably the poster child of “shareble” content with their embedable video player, that is what made their business.
Once you have content or items worth sharing it’s important to measure and track how people are using and sharing it. Measurement can help you track where things start, who are the influencers, and what the response is.
Of course the big rhino in the room is why would someone want to share your stuff with other people. Most companies seem to think putting an “email to a friend” link on their mundane web site is enough to get people frothing at the mouth to tell their friends. Unfortunately that is not enough, the act of sharing something requires not only effort but generally involves someone putting their reputation on the line. If someone is sharing something of yours be it a video, image, coupon etc. they are endorsing you and you had better make them look good.
You might even try and cultivate sharers and influencers, some people like to be firestarters, they like to be the first to know, and they like to be the first to tell their friends about it. Take a look at Jeremiah’s concept of early adopters/influencers or David Armano’s Influence Rippples Diagram for more on this.
One thing I wonder about this is how much more shareble are real world products, or at least information about real world products will become as the mobile evernet becomes more pervasive? Think how text message short codes could be used on real world products, or on environmental media.
Mashable
Mashable means can someone build something new and interesting information you provide? Is there any base of machine readable structured data that you can give access to your customers, programmers, kids with too much time on their hands? RSS, XML, or even proper API’s. Think google maps, craigs list, RSS feeds, Geocoded information etc.
Think about what information is created just through the use of your product or service, and how can that make your product more attractive. A brilliant example of this comes from Facebook, when you see the underlying data of how your friends are using certain applications or games, you can see how much more attractive these products become. Take the Texas Holdem application for instance which has presence information, leader-board information etc.
Hackable
Hacking of course has some pretty scary connotations, but hackability is essentially the secret behind a lot of the buzz created by products like the Roomba, Lego Mind Storms, and maybe even Harley Davidsons and Mini Coopers. How can customers make your product their own which can be as simple as customization, and how can they make it do things that you didn’t even intend 
So how can you make it hackable? distribute source code, create api’s, create easter eggs, create competitions, put frameworks in place. Even some of these consumer generated commercials where a company might provide different video assets and soundtracks to enable customers to create their own commercials is hackability in a way. putting a framework in place for people to be creative.
These are just some rough ideas of what can contribute to the co-creative marketing of a product. I have one more aspect which I have not quite figured out where it fits and how to describe it, but it’s at the heart of what makes products and services co-creative. It’s where customers contribute to the primary value of a product or service, think ebay, threadless, yelp, flickr, Etsy, ThisNext, Delicious. They all have aspects that are shareable, mashable, and hackable, but the primary value they create is co-creative. So what is that? Contributable? Crowdsourced?
13 Comments, Comment or Ping
Stephanie Frasco
This is great! I completely agree with the 3 components of a co-creative marketing Campaign. Now making it stick and pollenate..that’s where it gets tough.
I am working on a “viral” music campaign. I’d love to see how these three work together to make something memorable. I will update you soon.
Oct 8th, 2007
Karl
Thanks Stephanie, i’ll be really interested to hear how your viral music campaign goes, certainly keep me updated.
Oct 8th, 2007
Lisa McNeill
Great article. And I can’t even begin to tell you how many websites are STILL without RSS. Makes it really hard for information to be readily shared and cross pollinated.
Oct 9th, 2007
Davis Freeberg
Some pretty interesting ideas. I think you’ve built the right framwork for looking at this issue, but I’ll still weigh in with my own opinions.
Sharing - Convenience is key, if it’s not easy to share, then it will need to be something really special, in order for it go viral. If you are hoping that your customers will record and transfer your TV commercials to YouTube, it’s not going to happen, unless you have a brand that people are nuts about. If all I have to do is embed some code or copy a link, the chances of me sharing it, goes up dramatically. I think a key component to getting people to share is to offer ways to personalize the content. Bob Dylan did a good job of this with his latest mashup that lets you write personalized messages in one of his music videos.
Mashable - I think that this can help to turn something viral into a longer lasting experience, but don’t see it as a necessity in order for consumers to get excited about something. The real advantage to supporting outside applications, is that it increases the number of ways that people will interact with your service. No matter how awesome any one application is, I’m still amazed at how creative the social web can be.
Hackable - I don’t think that this is quite as important as the ability to personalize your experience. Most consumers don’t really have an interest in hacking anything, but they do want to find ways to make things unique to their lives. I think it’s good to encourage this community, but I would be more excited about having easy to use functionality to begin with.
Oct 9th, 2007
Karl
@Lisa Yeah, rss is pretty fundemental, although I think companies often have trouble coming up with stuff interesting enough on a regular basis to go in rss
@Davis really appreciate your comment. Agree easy to share is critical, but I think there is two sides to it, ease of sharing and motivation to share. If it is easy but not worth sharing it’s kind of like that “email to a friend” text field that ends up being a placebo for shareability. Good point about mashable contributing to the sustainability of the viral effect, it also enables bringing value to a wider group that you may not have every accessed before. The craigs list/google maps mashup probably expanded to reach people beyond the standard craigs list user. As for Hackable, that is certainly a higher order of co-creation or co-creative marketing, but your point about making things unique in peoples live is important. My example of the mini cooper for example, not much real “hacking” going on there, but some conspicuous personalization
Oct 9th, 2007
Davis Freeberg
I agree with you that sharing is something that goes beyond just an email link, but I also think that it is a very fluid concept. A lot of it depends on who your customers are. When I was reading your post, there were two specific examples that came to mind.
I tend to be pretty interested in all that financial muckety muck stuff. One of my favorites segments each day is called the Faber report on CNBC. This guy has internet star power written all over him, but CNBC has pretty much squandered it. His reports are very good and he is always dropping bombshells on the market. I could probably blog about the Faber report every day, except it’s really hard to get a permanent copy of the clip.
First I’ve got to have a media center, then I need to be recording CNBC (and trust me, people don’t time shift breaking financial news), then I’ve got to use editing software to get what I want from the clip and finally risk getting in trouble, by illegally uploading the clip to the internet. After all that, I’ll still need to spend an hour putting together good commentary on what he was talking about.
Now I’m a fan of the Faber report, but I’m not a super fan and because CNBC doesn’t have super fans, they’ve basically made this content unshareable with the rest of the internet. The content has limited value delayed, but could hold real marketing power if the finance blogs could get a hold of it. Pretty soon people would start seeing Faber coverage, just like Jim Cramer gets today.
If people start thinking, I could have seen that live, if I had only been watching CNBC, then by making this media available, there is tremendous upside and little cost associated with it. This is an opportunity, that CNBC is failing to capitalize on. It funny to see them put a Digg this button on all of their videos, but then see none of them take off. Maybe if CNBC didn’t insist on using a proprietary media player or disabling their embedding, more people would find the content and would share it with their social networks.
On the other hand, the Wii has super fans and this means that you have to take a different approach to making something shareable. Last year, Nintendo released a commercial on TiVo and one of their super fans went through the trouble of videotaping the commercial, editing it and then added it to the internet. From there, the fan then proceeded to submit the video commercial to Joystiq, Kotaku, Digg and a number of other sites, where it proceeded to get a lot of attention. By making it little harder to get at the content, Nintendo actually made their content more shareable among their community.
I think there are lots of opportunities to go after the super fans. Leaked screen shots that leave you guessing or ambiguous quotes always get the Apple die hards excited. If you don’t already have this buzz though, then it’s especially important that you go out of your way to make it as easy as possible for people to be exposed to your message.
Oct 9th, 2007
Karl
Great example Davis, i like the daily show (future) strategy of releasing the entire show online the day after it airs in short, web consumable segments.
Oct 9th, 2007
Henri Weijo
Good stuff.
I’m writing my master’s thesis now on modern branding strategies and one of my main arguments is that Viral is NOT a strategy, it’s a tactic.
Oct 14th, 2007
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