Viral Marketing vs Social Media Marketing.. Are They The Same Thing?
…”In this corner we have the defending self replicating champ Viral Marketing. In the other corner we have the word of mouth up and coming challenger Social Media Marketing”….
Viral Marketing vs. Social Media Marketing, whats there to fight about? They are the same thing right?
Wrong! (ding ding ding)
Well, to be fair they seem like the same thing and find themselves in that “grey area” of marketing. I am just saying it really easy to get the two of them confused, I can easily see how it can happen. So what is the difference between the two? Lets break it down in list form, people like lists.
Viral Marketing
-Simply relies on the audience to distribute the objective
-Uses social networks like Facebook, MySpace, Linkedin, Twitter to help achieve an objective…i.e sales, brand awareness, etc
- This objective is obtained by a “Viral Action”. This action is people passing on the content such as video, picture, an application, banner, heck even just word of mouth.
-Sometimes people don’t even realize they are passing on a viral marketing message. I did it earlier this year with this video, I did not know it was from Gatorade. I totally fell for it did you? Here lies the big difference between Viral and Social Media Marketing, Viral is sneaky and sometimes you don’t even know your passing on a marketing message.
Bottom Line:Viral relies on the audience to spread the message with little or no interaction. Its a one time interaction.
Social Media Marketing
- SM Marketing relies on the audience to distribute and engage in the dialogue and sometimes the creation of additional content.
-Its about engaging,communicating via a dialogue and interacting with people. More so customers.
-Increasing traffic to a site by links, brand awareness and well attention.
-You pay attention to what your customer/user wants and needs! You do this by listening, interacting, chatting.
- One does this by having a presence on social networking sites and channels. We are talking about Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Blogs, Podcasts, Digg and others. The brand interacts and engages with the community, customer or even potential customer.
Bottom Line: SM Marketing uses good content to start a conversation with the goal of the relationship to grow, get deeper and keep it going
Both Viral Marketing and Social Media Marketing have the same goal, getting the word out about a brand. Yes, we are talking Word Of Mouth Marketing, which is passing information on.
Thanks to John Avilla for letting me bounce ideas of him for this post and helping me break it down.
Great post, Dave. Both require some level of action from people, but social media marketing has added an active “engagement” dimension, a conversational aspect. Another differenciation comes from the fact that viral marketing is a one to many interaction, while social media is more one to one – or many to many.
Good summary Dave. This is a hot topic for many small and medium sized marketing agencies. Word of Mouth also is playing an interesting role in conversations with our clients.
Truth is there are only pockets of marketers and agencies out there who are looking at the value of this kind of marketing.
There is a growing demand and capacity to measure audience engagement with brands. Whether viral, WOM, Social, etc. we are looking at more effective ways to engage our audiences in conversations.
Planned viral seems more like “hopeful” marketing, i.e., the VP of Marketing hopes their message/product/brand gets spread around by wildfire (the “many”). I’d think true viral marketing is more noticeable after the fact, i.e. Napster when it first came out (“wow, they got millions of users just by word of mouth and no advertising..that WAS some viral marketing going on there).
Social media marketing, like your Gatorade example, seems to be analagous to “planned viral marketing”…throw the shit against the wall with some level of confidence that it will stick, since the word-of-mouth factor between social networkers seems more sticky than unpredictable viral audiences.
Ah, but what do I know
The Spiritual Dimension…
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There is a lot of overlap between viral and social media marketing. I think you hit on the most important point though: the relationship. SM is going for something lasting and a lot deeper than viral.
i do Social Media Marketing specially when promoting a new website or an affiliate product. Social media is more effective than offline advertising in my opinion.
Social Media Marketing has understood that a good viral campaign starts creating relationships and comunnity with fans… Look Starbucks..5 millions de fans in facebook page…What's more viral than it…
Take a look my new history about Social media vs buzz and viral http://www.juanmarketing.com/social-media-marketi…
Hi to all marketing passionated
i have tried social media marketing for getting our new products to be known on the market. it seems to work well specially if the audience is targeted .-