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.

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.

@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

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.