It's All About The Viral Marketing

Our discussion in class last night on online influentials and the possible exploitation of the media exemption by bloggers and anyone else who wants to claim the title "journalist," combined with some of our earlier class topics, really made one point clear to me: it's all about viral messages. Online Influentials (I suppose I need to put a copyright sign next to that word thanks to Roeper; how lame is that?) are valuable to a campaign in no small part because they will actively spread the campaign's message, and we've seen how the self-perpetuating nature of an effective viral message can spread a campaign message at no cost to the campaign itself. The need to win over these online influential also makes me skeptical that a corporation could simply buy effectiveness on the internet, but that's a subject for another post later this week.

Influentials are valuable to a campaign because they spread the message. They forward emails to their friends, tell their fishing buddies who to vote for, and generally act as a repeater station for the campaign's signal. This is true whether the influential is online or not: they key is winning over that influential, because once you do, she'll take on moving your message to her friends and associates.

One can easily see the value of this in the context of a campaign, especially for smaller campaigns with smaller communications budgets but also for larger campaigns that need to find an effective way to cut through the clutter. As the Bush campaign showed us, hearing a message from a friend of neighbor is much more effective than hearing it through the TV or from outsiders (especially if they are wearing bright orange hats).

I doubt the concept of winning over influentials is anything new in the world of campaigning; after all, isn't that what the old block captains were back in the day? But reaching these influentials takes work, and any new technique that lessens the effort needed to reach these individuals is welcome.

That's where IPDI's work on this topic is so important. It makes all the sense in the world that campaign website visitors would be more likely to be influentials, but six times more likely than the public at large? That's phenomenal! And to combine this easy way to find influentials with the low-cost nature of the web makes this discovery like a gold mine. Using the web to target influentials is an absolute no brainer, no matter the size of the campaign. These are your viral marketers, and any campaign that ignores this self-powered outlet for their message deserves to lose.