Contagion Media Limited

Social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace have changed the face of the internet forever. Over the last three years internet users have become used to the concept of social groups. Many pioneering companies have developed apps and games to run in these environments. These have become steadily more successful, with the latest offering from Zynga games, Farmville being played by a staggering 55 million users every month.

Generally however digital marketing has not absorbed the shift towards social media. The idea of viral marketing and social media are banded around yet few really understand the thinking and technology that make them work.  In most projects I have worked on, social media is seen as an add-on. A marketing asset is produced, and then once finished you try and put it on Facebook. This often reduces down to simply creating a bookmark button on the asset. There is a massive potential for spreading marketing messages through social media, but this approach is doomed to failure, and this in turn has resulted in social media as being a voodoo art form.

When you design an application which works on a social platform or series of social platforms, there needs to be a different model of thinking than to “create a widget and send an email to a friend or bookmark it ”. Firstly each social platform has its own system or systems of messaging. For instance Facebook provides several ways applications can spread themselves virally e.g.:-

• Through invitation – By placing an invite your friends button on an application canvas, you can invite several friends to join you in using the widget.
• Through the Wall – The wall is a message board which shares posts from and to all your friends. All walls may be different because each user has a unique set of friends, posts however are shared across social groups. Wall posts can embed hyperlinks to quickly entice users to use a widget. These wall messages are the primary vehicle of successful viral spread today on Facebook.

Each social network has its unique way of doing this, and so each network has to be considered carefully as to how to approach viral spread.

Often implementations are quite simple as long as they are well thought out. It is not a magical process to come up with a series of appealing messages to go on someone’s Facebook wall to report the user’s progress and success that will entice their friends at least to find out what it is their friend is in to.  When this is planned into a project from the start, there is usually little overhead to adding this massively virally potent technique.

The second piece of thinking that needs to change is in the operation of the widget itself. Social network users are on social networks to interact socially. It sounds obvious, but its impact on application development is significant. Users expect your application to work socially, to have some element of information transfer, comparison or collaboration between people.

The importance of the quality of this social interaction cannot be underestimated. No widget or game will be successful it is utterly boring or useless. The quality however of the individual experience is of secondary importance to the quality of social interaction. The better the model for this social interaction the more virally potent your application becomes.

Farmville again is a wonderful example. It is a common misconception that Farmville is a new style of game. Nothing could be further from the truth. Long before Zynga games developed Farmville there were farming games that you would find hard to distinguish from Farmville except for the logos. In fact Farmville does not even represent the best game play experience out of all of these predecessors. What created the phenomenon of Farmville was the quality of social interaction that the game supports. Through careful research in the beta versions of the game, Zynga explored how the messages, gifts and elements of game play (like neighbouring farms, or helping on each other’s farms) maximised this viral spread.

The lesson here is clear, that it is the quality of the social interaction that will define your widgets success on social networks more than its individual functioning. Even more consideration needs to be spent on the viral mechanics and social engagement of any widget destined for social networks than its core functionality. This consideration also needs to be made at the start; building the core functionality around the viral/social mechanic is far more sensible than the other way around. The core functionality can be shaped, it is within your control, viral mechanics and spread methods are defined by the social networks being targeted and are effectively fixed. This is why adding social media abilities at the end of a project is usually so ineffective.

The power of social media is enormous; they have the ability to multiply seeding numbers by 1000s. For the first time in marketing history millions of people can be reached on a mass media for very little investment. This may change in the future, but at the moment, social media success belongs to those who take the time to understand it and to build their projects intelligently integrating its requirements from day one of planning.