Second Life: Spreading like a Virus

After writing about Second Life on Friday, I came across two interesting references to it from a marketing perspective.

First, Max Kalehoff cited a Wall Street Journal story about the marketing strategy for Toyota's Scion brand on his blog. In addition to highlighting Scion's move away from televsion advertising as well as their decision to scale back production in order to keep the brand "special," the WSJ article also mentioned that they are moving their "online social-networking marketing focus" from myspace.com to Second LIfe. WSJ says that Scion made this move because they want to be "up to the moment and beyond." I say, "Don't we all?"

Secondly, I was perusing the latest issue of Fast Company and discovered this article on viral marketing. The focus of the article is a firm called Campfire that specializes in engineering viral campaigns. Campfire, which was founded by a couple of the guys who worked on The Blair Witch Project, has already had success creating viral advertainment for Sega and Audi and has now been tapped by Pontiac and Leo Burnett to help them "build a community around the carmaker in Second Life."

Community is key to being viral in at least three ways:

1. You need to immerse yourself in the target community before releasing your marketing pathogen.

For example, while developing their Sega campaign, they hung out on gamer fan sites and message boards to learn the lingo and identify opinion makers to whom they "leaked" bootleg versions of the game they were promoting.

2. Don't piss off the target community.

The quickest way to do that is to make them feel like they are a target community. The other way is to violate communal conventions or traditions. Campfire pointed out to Leo Burnett, for example, that one car manufacturer who had tried to gain traction in Second Life annoyed long-time users by giving away cars for free, thus wrecking the market for established, in-world carmakers.

3. A virus creates a community.

This community consists of the people who "catch" the virus. In order to grow this community, you will not only need content that draws people in, you will also need to cultivate a rank of "hardcore" participants who will actively generate interest in it. In fact, you might have to invent such fans to push things (just make sure you don't violate Rule #2), as Campfire did for one of their campaigns.

The idea of "viral marketing" is itself a kind of virus and infected marketers, specifically those, as the FC article points out, who talk about campaigns being viral before they've even launched, need to be reminded and warned: You don't make the campaign viral. Far from it.

Just as "it takes a village to raise a child," never forget that it takes a community to spread a virus.

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