Rand Fishkin Interview - Social Media Marketing And Viral Marketing by Rachelle Money, 20 May 2008
Rand Fishkin is a popular speaker at search engine optimization conferences – not so much for his trademark yellow sneakers – but for his direct and uncompromising advocacy of social media marketing. His strategy is to focus on the ‘linkerati’, the new breed of bloggers whose approval is often the first stage in launching a successful campaign, and he insists the quickest way to kill a viral campaign is by giving it to your public relations department. Fishkin explains his approach and gives top tips on social media marketing.
Key points
- Viral content can present itself in a variety of mediums - a blog post, a video, a diagram, a photograh or an article. What is important is that it is easy to spread and that it attracts the right type of audience.
- Tap into the 'linkerati', a community who have the maximum potential to spread your content. This could be through posting about it on a forum, writing a blog or linking to it, voting for it on Reddit, Del.icio.us, or Digg. They could also email it to their friends or text message it through Twitter.
- Intelligent search campaigns use keywords appropriately in the link text, headlines, tags and the viral content itself i.e. blog post, podcast and video caption.
- Don't let your Public Relations departement kill your story. Compelling content can be turned into something that looks and sounds like everything else because of a over zealous use of communications guidelines.
Many marketers smile wryly at the thought of bygone days when innovative direct marketing consisted of women arranging Tupperware parties in their local neighborhoods - but for Rand Fishkin, CEO and co-founder of SEOmoz (www.seomoz.org), this is where the first brick of Social Media Marketing was laid.
Fishkin, who has quickly become an industry leader thanks to an award-winning SEO blog, says the widespread popularity and the ease with which Social Media Marketing (SMM) performs is relatively new, but that the practice itself is "just an expansion of something like Tupperware parties in the 1950s."
He goes on to explain, "People were getting together in a real space instead of an online space to share things, so that’s the first instance that I can think of of SMM - but I’m sure it happened before that."
If a marketer successfully executes an SMM campaign it can go viral, meaning it will spread rapidly across the internet through social media platforms like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Squidoo etc, where your brand will get maximum exposure.
Fishkin pauses for a moment and then somewhere in his brain he extracts a comparison that really tops it - Picasso was the first viral marketer!
"If you're an art lover I’m sure you would say Picasso was doing viral marketing in the Paris Salons by having one piece shown which would make an impact, thereby leading people to want more. In essence you are doing the same thing - viral content - or in this case a painting, is being put out there where your peers are, where everyone is collecting, and you know people are going to be paying attention to what's produced.
"The principle is old but the medium is what makes it possible for companies large and small to engage in it." Within just a few minutes of talking to Fishkin it’s easy to see why he is so successful. His company has attracted considerable attention from the likes of the Washington Post, Newsweek and USA Today. He’s also a regular on the SEO conference circuit where he dons his trademark bright yellow sneakers. He says this is because ‘techies’ never remember faces, so when he’s in town, you only have to remember his shoes.
SEOmoz is a consultancy firm offering internet marketing and search engine optimization services. Their goal, they say, is to educate clients so that “they can best leverage the unique reach of the internet.”
Fishkin thinks it’s time to take a leaf out of Picasso’s book and go viral. By establishing good content for your product, viral marketing campaigns offer a solution to companies who want to stand out from the crowd.
Fishkin says: “Viral content when it comes to web marketing could be a blog post, a video, a diagram, an article, a photograph - any number of different mediums can be used to convey viral content. What is important is that it is easy to spread and that it attracts the right type of audience.” Fishkin has dubbed this audience the “linkorati’, a community who have the maximum potential to spread your content.
“They are very good at taking content they enjoy and spreading it throughout the internet - that could be through posting about it on a forum, writing a blog or linking to it, voting for it on Reddit, Del.icio.us, or Digg; or they could email it to their friends or text message it through Twitter.”
Although Fishkin and his team brainstorm ideas for viral content and create what they feel is a good package, he admits they have to "strike out" a few times before they meet success.
"With our clients, our process has always been to guarantee that we will get three stories popular over the next three months. If we blog something and it doesn’t work we try again until we get a success."
Fishkin’s advice on how to avoid a catastrophic campaign is controversial - he says businesses should bypass their Public Relations Departments.
"Every time you give your PR department content to edit, I promise you the content will not go viral - your PR department will rip the soul out of it.
"That’s a big problem for a lot of large companies. They have processes they need to go through, and anything that goes on the website has to go through PR and content quality checks - those things can ruin what would have been an incredibly insightful, cool piece of data. Something really compelling will be turned into something that looks and sounds like everything else because a PR department got their hands on it."
Good examples of viral marketing campaigns, in Fishkin’s eyes, have been video game producers World of Warcraft and technology giants, Apple.
World of Warcraft launched an international campaign where they produced video advertisements where actors like Jean-Claude Van Damme and Verne Troyer (Mini Me from Austin Powers films) talked about the characters they played in the game. "They have hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube for their videos, so you’re talking about reaching millions of people through the natural spread of this content," says Fishkin.
Apple’s advert where two men acting as a PC and a Mac talking back and forth is, to Fishkin, "a perfect example where the content is created for advertising and becomes a viral campaign with social media around it."
This emerging style of campaign has presented modern-day marketers and advertisers with a real challenge. It is no longer necessary nor viable to sit in boardrooms discussing what the ad’s jingle should sound like or how to communicate the product‘s benefits.
Fishkin says that in the last five years we have entered into "a very different scenario" where marketers need to think about applying content which is going to "spread the brand further and wider than what we paid for in advertising".
Companies don’t have to go down the route of Apple or World of Warcraft with online videos; as Fishkin has already pointed out, blogging is a great way to create viral content. He sites Guy Kawasaki, John Chow and Techcrunch as sources of viral content, but even outside these more obvious realms, Fishkin says he has recently seen blogs on scrapbooking go viral.
Adopting viral content and SMM within traditional marketing approaches is fast becoming a necessity for businesses. Fishkin says it is a "low investment, high return package" but provides a caveat - it needs a knowledgeable person at the helm.
"The only way this works is with someone who is intimately familiar with the blogosphere, has considerable experience promoting content and can see what works, so that they will be able to predict success.
"In saying that, hundreds of unpredictable stories, videos and pieces of work go viral every week. It’s a hard thing to predict but from a business viewpoint it’s something you must try to engage in," Fishkin adds.
Tips From Rand Fishkin On Social Media Marketing And How To Make Content Go Viral
- Research. Find out who in your industry has had success in this area, and of course who has failed. How have they made it work? Talk to your peers to find how they went about launching viral content and discuss it with marketing professionals who have experience.
- Brainstorm. Getting ideas together at this stage will be a lot easier because you already know what works. Pick some of the best ideas, execute them and show them to a sample audience such as a group of friends, or people you think can be critical of you.
- The Big Push. If your audience is ready to spread it then you have to come up with a strategy that will push the content out. This can be done by emailing bloggers, submitting it on social media sites, talking about it on your own blog, posting a Twitter on it, emailing influential friends. If you can take a campaign wide once or twice, the next time you produce something you won’t have to push it as hard because the audience already recognizes you. It will spread naturally.
- Only kill content if you are getting negative feedback or a lot of criticism. Not all publicity is good publicity. You don’t want to become an online laughing stock.
- Even if nothing is happening, leave it out there. Sometimes a year later it will go popular for no particular reason. That’s the great thing about the web - you can put something out there, think it has failed, and a few months later it turns out to be a big hit. It can be down to bad timing, or the right person not seeing it first time round.
- Keyword Research. One of the things we (SEOmoz) always advise our clients is to execute their campaigns intelligently from a search perspective. The links they provide must have the right keywords, and the same thing has to be said when they're optimizing their viral content - such as videos, pod casts, blogs etc.
- Make sure that it’s easy to link to your URL, that you have a link to it, share this, here’s a banner, here’s a badge - ie a piece of content you can talk about. It has to be easy to share and easy to spread.
Make sure the content is kept on your website so that people are linking to your site rather than going to YouTube for videos. Do this to make sure you are earning all the link benefit.
About Rand Fishkin
Rand first became involved with the World Wide Web in 1993, while still in high school and eventually became a consultant on website usability for small businesses in Seattle.
In 2002 he ventured into the field of search marketing and was soon posting reports, data, and tools in a subfolder that eventually became SEOmoz. Rand is now at the helm of what is arguably one of the most influential search marketing companies in the world, which has also led him to become a highly sought after conference speaker.
About Rachelle Money
Rachelle Money is a freelance journalist based in Scotland, UK. She graduated from the Scottish School of Journalism in 2005 where she was awarded an internship with two national publications - The Sunday Herald newspaper and The Big Issue magazine. Rachelle has been working with Wordtracker since August 2007 and is a regular contributor to the newsletter.
35 comments
very informative article. Rand's website is also full of great advice on SEO. The only problem with viral content is working out what will work and what doesn't
For a change, I clicked through the Wordtracker email! Thanks for featuring Rand as well as providing some great food for thought. Gambling with viral explosions is definitely the way to go. There's nothing like the brain aching challenge of scheming up the next hit ... or flop. Rand's comment about viral scrapbooking clicked on a light bulb--guess I'll have to show that one to my wife.
This is an outstanding article. I look forward to more like this. Another great viral video series is the "Will it Blend" series on YouTube.com. Viral marketing is great. But what comes to mind is that, like when telling a joke, if you try to hard to get the effect, you fail. You have to be authentic with people. If you TRY to be viral, you'll probably be a joke. But if you try to have fun, you might just take off. Consider the Mentos in Coke series. Mentos could have never created that viral buzz on purpose. One tip: Make lots of friends on youtube, myspace, or wherever. It can't go viral if no one sees it.
Jerry; Interesting to hear you mention Will it Blend? viral marketing campaign.
Look out for our next newsletter to read my interview with Will It Blend CEO Tom Dickson.
Great to read this. It pieces together and confirms things I have read and seen from many sources. Encourages me to keep going. Is that wise? Only time will tell.
Great article and other good articles on Rands blog. I have been doing viral stuff on Squid, Twitter, Spacers and FB for a while and getting great results. I'm just getting into the Youtube thing and going to test doing Utterz too.
Great first post Rachelle, In my books you can pick no one better for viral marketing, guys awesome!
Thank you for highlighting the value and need to include social media into the marketing plan. People are starting to take note. Great job, Rachelle!
Excellent perspective on the HOTTEST topic approaching most businesses that have 16-30 years olds as a high percentage of their customer base. The 'difficlt' part of this is explaining to older managers in your company on how truly important this is to act upon, as most of them are clueless about social & viral marketing! Without 'proveable' data on success, most viral marketing ideas can get shot-down at MOST traditionally run businesses...
Any tips and tricks to applying these concepts to b to b transactions involving commercial products. All of these social viral marketing articles I read are fascinating, but seem more geared toward attracting the 15-30 year old male/females to commodity consumer products. How can I virally social market to institutional buyers in gov, hospitals, universities who are sitting in a cube at work (just like me) where its not always in ones best interest to be caught watching youtube videos of a guy blending iphones or putting mentos in coke. Not to mention youtube is blocked by most business firewalls anyway. I think this type of info would be useful to a large number of readers.
I know, blog post, product guides, how-to's etc...But i don't see that type of stuff ever being picked up by the so called technorati. At the same time I don't necessarily want it to. A million teenagers coming to my site to laugh at my video is fine. But really I need 1000 converting customers to come and buy my expensive products
Thanks!
Amazing article, Rachelle. “Every time you give your PR department content to edit, I promise you the content will not go viral” That's exactly right. SMM is always a hard sell to larger companies employing dinosaur marketing strategies.
The Apple scenario is a perfect example.
The content has such a clear style and personality that as soon as a campaign is launched, you tube is crammed with imitators (sincerest form of flattery?) which are often affectionate or at worst, cheeky, while rarely negative.
If the PR or marketeers weren't led by the clear vision of Jobs and co, then it might have been milked of personality, rather than retain it's current debatable charm. - remember the "stoned" girl (it was actually an allergy) and her imitators? It was simultaneously loved and satirised.
In creation of a Viral Marketing piece remember to create value for your audience. Make the value industry specific and be certain it has enough value to really pull a punch. Forwarding and posting cartoons can only go so far, unless of course it a cartoon or funny image that is so unique and fresh others can't help but share it.
Thanks for the article, and I want to echo Andrew Jensen comment - I clicked through to read this one because I recognized the SEOMoz brand. I was looking for a little bit more meat in the article, but the tips at the end are pretty good. ~James
I generally don't click through the Wordtracker email, did today when I saw this article. A Very informative about the future of online marketing through social media. Rand is quite right about the PR departments ripping the soul out of content - simply because they are using outdated ideas. It's the same scenario when the web was starting up -marketers and PR's coming onto the web and believing that offline marketing techniques would work on a medium that was originally based around communities.
Great article. Rand really has some great advice. The part where he says that a piece can go viral after a long time is a great point. I have actually had several pieces I thought were lost resurface and bring sales after as long as two years
From the B2B marketer perspective, I think Social works two fold. First, research where/what your audience is talking about so that it can play into your marketing strategy. Second, be transparently relevant, let it go out and see what happens. That is the hard thing in the B2B space, smaller audiences...
The best point of the article is to be sure to post the content on your own site first (depending on what you are doing) not YouTube. You want to get the benefit - though youtube does allow others to copy and paste the code to put the video on their own site (so as long as you have a visual tag at the back of the video) allowing others to use it may have an advantage in certain cases - we're in a niche market - healing arts DVDs - and have had a slow steady success by people recommending out site to others via word of mouth and many people are now re-ordering as gifts for friends - part of our success is due to the video on our site. It's made a big difference. We've set up an affiliate program to reward refers..."check out the Himalayan yogi clip" that sort of recommendation is our next step. Again, we are a small niche so we measure success differently - we're not Nike...measure your success against what you are offering - I imagine most people reading this have a small business of some sorts.
Yeah man; send out email spam to your friends and buds and associates to get them to vote up your content on digg, sphinn, reddit, and twitter. That's the ticket. Boy, do I love this social media crap or what?
Not.
A social media expert? I guess if that is a title one wants to have, then go for it. Not me.
My only regret is the time I spent reading this. Time is money.
Great to hear an opinion on Social Media coming from SEOmoz - resource that we all have a lot of respect for. People that got into SMM and do it naturally should be able to benefit tremendously, even if it’s just a link-bait thing. I wonder about cost-effectiveness of Social Media, if anyone seen any research. SMM isn’t free if you have to hire someone to do it for you or if you have to spend your own time. Thanks!
Thanks a bunch, a few great tips for beginners or people like me. Keep up the good work.
Great Stuff! The challenge for small business is to create interesting newsworthy information rather than boring product info. What works... what doesn't? I guess I'm reminded here of one way to look at success... "Success is achieved by getting up just one more time than you fail" Thanks again.
We creates a keyword research tool with a twist called seed keywords. Using Twitter we got it in front of Rand Fishkin, Aaron Wall and Seth Godin all within a few hours. Rand and Aaron gave it a thumbs up and blogged about it = great links and exposure. SMM works.
d
Nice interview Rachelle. Rand's regular interaction with the large community of users on seomoz.org has fostered a very civil and entertaining culture there. All of the SEOmoz staffers are highly skilled, friendly and helpful. It's a great place to learn about the concepts that they use to promote their clients.
How to make something viral? I've read Rand Fishkin's info from various sources - so by now I know the theory off by heart. Harder, I'm sure, is making it happen - because lots more people have been reading this stuff than succeeding. And here I am, just entering the fray. What Fishkin does is confirm what I've been hearing - giving me yet another push into the pool of HubPages, FaceBook, MySpace - a world that was foreign to me less than a year ago, but now seems to be all around me.
I kind of take offense to this as I work as a marketing communications strategist who not only works with social media, but PR as well. As a younger practitioner we realize the importance of hitting both angles. Good points, but not conducive to all workers.
Rand, im getting very good at conventional on page SEO, tags, titles, Keyword research, all the onpage stuff. As far as link building, i do alot of directory submissions, reciprical link building, but am adventuring into social bookmarking, and it is very exciting and interesting. I appriciate your tips and insight, and it has motivated me and struck a even depper curiosity and passion, and I thank you, all the best.
Loren
"Success is achieved by getting up just one more time than you fail" Thank you.
Nice Advice Rand, share some idea on SMO as well.
Great interview with Rand and thanks Dave for pointing out your seed keyword tool. It's great. Proof in point in putting out quality link bait.
I'm bought into SMM big time. The challenge I find is getting clients across different industries to buy in. In many B2B industries SMM will lag behind other industries, especially B2C industries where the demographics can be more favorable.
Sounds like SMM is PR without a condom, the part that the corporate PR department bans because it could blemish a brand that they have invested years in the making or acquiring as a client.
Perhaps this type of hit or miss volatile PR is most beneficial to a small business that has nothing to lose and everything to gain from a viral success.
What a GREAT GREAT article with the genius himself!
I didn't realize you do interviews etc?
pretty cool stuff!
The blog has been a differentiator for the company by providing a lot of press and publicity as well as serving to expose us to a lot more opinion and feedback in the search marketplace. The blog has helped us generate business primarily through the publicity that comes with it.
Nicky Philip
Social Media Marketing
Another great insight from one of the Web's leader on SEO and SMM. Great interview format, I hate to read interviews with only back in forts between two persons.