It's every marketer's dream: deliver a message so compelling that everyone who sees it passes it along to their friends, increasing your brand recognition, sales, and bottom line. On the Internet, we call this viral marketing, though it is certainly used in other media as well. How do you make your marketing campaign go viral? In this article, I'll talk about some elements you should include.
The first viral marketing campaign I can recall coming across – at least on the Internet – was Burger King's Subservient Chicken. Yes, that old bird from early 2004 is still around, and still will do whatever you type into the text box – well, unless you tell it to remove its mask; then it scolds the screen. The site also features some still photos of the chicken in action, and a “chicken mask” that you can print out, with the following instructions:
1. Cut out mask on dotted line. 2. Put on chicken face. 3. Be subservient.
Most important of all, it includes a link that allows visitors to tell their friends about the site. This is one of the keys to running a successful viral marketing campaign; you need to make it easy for those who visit your content to pass it along so it can spread.
It's not the only important element, however. Let's look at what else Burger King did. Not every campaign needs to feature everything I'm going to discuss, but if we can understand why this one was so successful, we can figure out how to repeat it.
The biggest element of the campaign was user interaction. If you don't tell it to do anything, the chicken will just stand there, or perhaps fidget amusingly. Give a visitor something to do, and they'll stick around for a while. Make it amusing and/or entertaining, and they might stick around for quite a while. If you're going to build something that calls for user interaction, however, you need to think it through carefully. Visitors can type literally anything into the Subservient Chicken space; Burger King needed to be prepared for that. The Subservient Chicken will respond to 300 commands.
Importantly, the Subservient Chicken is totally “on message” for Burger King's campaign. They wanted to promote their chicken sandwiches and meals, and get across the point that you could have chicken with them any way you wanted it. To all appearances, they succeeded.
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