How not to start a viral marketing campaign
I have been approached with a network marketing proposition where you build a team underneath you and get paid a commission when you or someone in your team sells the company’s retail product.
In the presentation (sales) videos they talk about wanting to dominate the market they are in by way of a viral marketing campaign. This is the reason for running the network marketing affiliate scheme.
Sounds reasonable so far doesn’t it. In fact I might have signed up for it even though I don’t have a huge network myself (yet) because as one of the videos said – you don’t know who you don’t know knows – or something along those lines.
Now the problem for me is this. In the terms and conditions of being a member/affiliate it basically says that you can’t talk about the company/product in any way on the internet. You can’t set up your own site to sell the product. You can’t mention it on any social networking sites unless you change your account settings so that you moderate any comments. Basically all you can do online is place a banner ad on your site.
This is the problem for me as I specialise in setting up micro/mini-sites and getting them on the front page of Google. This would have been one of my main avenues for promoting the product along with social media sites.
The whole concept of online viral marketing is to get people talking about your product/campaign or whatever. To get people talking about you and spread the word (hint: viral) you need to open up and start a conversation. The only reason I can think of for disallowing this is that they are scared of negative comments. For honest above board companies, not that I’m saying they aren’t but obviously if a company wasn’t they would find this harder, negative comments should be embraced as much as positive comments because you can then learn from your customers.
What do your customers want? What do they like? What do they not like? If you don’t know what the negative feelings are how can you put them right?
Not allowing people to talk about a product you are trying to promote with viral marketing is like having a fight club you want the whole world to know about but still having a first rule that says you don’t talk about fight club.
Has anyone come across anything similar or started a viral marketing campaign that’s worked?
