Viral marketing vs spreadable media

by iain

Infographic: Viral Marketing vs Spreadable Media

Over the last couple of years groups such as the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium have recommended replacing the use of the term ‘viral marketing’ with ‘spreadable media’. The main argument is that the viral metaphor has been stretched to try and explain any situation in which marketing content becomes popular and widely spread by an audience. The proponents of this view suggest “spreadable media” should be an alternative model for understanding how content is shared, and marketing videos and the like should be thought of not as a means of infecting audiences but rather as material that audiences can spread for their own purposes. All in all these are fair points, and they deserve the attention they have been given.

The term ‘viral marketing’ really came to prominence with the widely successful launch of the email service Hotmail. The backers of Hotmail wanted to spread the word about the service without expensive advertising investment, so added a link at the bottom of every email so recipients could click and sign-up themselves. So in many ways it was impossible for someone to not be a marketer for the Hotmail product because your very use of the service helped its propagation. Steve Jurvetson and Tim Draper said in the Netscape Newsletter at the time:

“Viral marketing captures the essence of multi-level marketing and applies it to all customers – the ‘word-of-mouth’ spread of Hotmail is involuntary”

My issue with ‘spreadable media’ as a concept is that it fails to take into account that social networks like Facebook and Twitter, actually allow brands to leverage what I would term as mainstream viral marketing, because in many campaigns the process of sharing is not necessarily a conscious decision, or a manual voluntary act. The infographic in this post shows how only one voluntary action, often in pursuit of an incentive, can kick-start an involuntary process of automated marketing transmissions to a users followers, thereby supporting the spread of the campaign.

This is analogous to the hotmail scenario, and we all knew of the success of the ‘viral’ spread of that service. Brands have seen similar success in the growth of their followers on Facebook and Twitter through the use of these type of ‘viral’ campaigns, many of which are documented in the Social Media Promotions group in Linkedin. So whilst the work around the concept of spreadable media does focus marketers to think harder about how and why content is shared, and in what context, don’t miss out on how you can use the viral marketing techniques possible within Facebook and Twitter to jump-start your campaigns.

38 Responses to Viral marketing vs spreadable media

Sam Ford says: August 25, 2010 at 1:30 pm

Hi Iain,

First, thanks for the fantastic infographic and the great post. I helped launch and later manage the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium and am currently working on the Spreadable Media book with Henry Jenkins and Joshua Green. Your post, of course, caught my attention. I don’t know if this will surprise you or not, but I agree with you wholeheartedly. Our goal with proposing the term “spreadable media” was not to replace “viral marketing” wholeheartedly, but to get people to think differently about the vast majority of content being called “viral” that really didn’t follow the Hotmail example at all.

In the process, as we began discussing with C3 colleagues modern-day equivalents to the Hotmail example, Alec Austin pointed out the functionality of Facebook apps to send automatic updates out to one’s network, i.e. Farmville. And Ilya Vedrashko made some similar points to you, which he wrote about at Forbes.

Of course, I’m biased, but I see this as less of a problem with “spreadable media” as an argument than as an important reminder that there are still a variety of examples that more aptly fit the “viral” metaphor, as your examples point toward.

Thanks for the post! I look forward to passing it along, which makes this post spreadable instead of viral, I think (unless you have some automated functionality built into your blog that pings one of my social networks without my knowledge)…

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