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Here are some quick thoughts on how the digital infrastructures are enabling people to share and spread content in different ways.

If you are on facebook, you have to be part of a network you have to be connected. If you don’t have a profile you don’t have access, and if you have a profile by no friends you only have access to those who have public profiles, and you are deprived from receiving updates. That is the infrastructure supports RSS for friends, is also supports RSS on statuses globally or limited by language, but there are too many updates for one person to read them before 1000 of new ones have emerged. Another option is to search for status updates of groups by keywords (if you doubt this try searching for Haiti in Facebook and choose “status of every one” to see how many people worldwide are writing about this event at the moment). But the infrastructure does not support a showing all containing one specific keyword either, only the first 100s or so, thus tracing back the history of what people wrote on Haiti is not possible not to say keeping up with what was written within the last 24 hours, when a theme is on everyone’s lips.

-The network is everything if you want to be updated in the way the infrastructure is build to support.

On Youtube most users are not connected or linked to each other. There is an infrastructure supporting that those with profiles can befriend each other thereby being updated on the friends’ newest uploads. But most people do not see the profile owners as important. The search for a video, and should they find several versions of it they are likely to pick the first, which due to Googles’ search algorithm is at top due to rankings and references. This the infrastructure provide different types of services depending on whether you have a profile or not, but both types of users can access the content.

-the network is not everything, instead we can talk about different tools: Youtube’s profile system, and Google’s search engine. Both are made up by different infrastructures affecting the way data is being represented.

This means that the infrastructure on Facebook supports faster, almost unavoidable, spreading of content between users, whereas if people wants to spread awareness of Youtube content the infrastructure provided on the side is not nessesarily enough. Thus blogs, twitter, mailing lists, Facebook etc are more likely to be integrated with spreading content from Youtube.

The infrastructure supporting spreading is therefore not only the place in which something is spread but also the supporting infrastructures needed.

As I am looking very much forward to attending  this course (PhD Course on Global Public Relations), I have written a short essay on my project and the intersection between my empirical data and the aims of the course. For the interested readers this is what came out:

The research project is about viral marketing. My three main cases are viral campaigns initiated by government financed companies in Denmark. Two aims at changing behaviors of Danish people, one aims at making non-Danes aware of Denmark as a country worth visiting. All three are initiated by uploading a short video to the Internet, but without making any direct connection to the campaign. This have caused people to start circulating the videos, exchange opinions about their content, as well as guessing what it is intended to mean. After a while the creators steps forward revealing who they are and what the intended message of the video is. This strategy has been chosen in order to make sure that the campaigns gain a great deal of public attention before it is revealed what it’s all about.

In order not only to reach a limited number of people all three videos have been made in English, thus deliberately aiming at reaching beyond the Danish public, even in the campaigns that have Danes, and only Danes, as their target audience.

From the above described strategy we can say that the public opinion plays an additional role next to that of changing a specific group of people’s behavior. It also serves as facilitator in spreading the word globally without necessarily knowing what it is, and even without necessarily being the limited amount of people the campaign is intended to effect in the end.

The strengths and weaknesses in this particular marketing strategy are closely related. Allowing the public to be part of the debate, contributing with opinions, theories and perhaps even detective’s findings is a strength since people are motivated to contribute, thereby providing their work for the campaign for free. However, opening up discussions for the public to engage, also opens op the options that they take the debate to places that was not foreseen.

Managing unexpected turns of events is an equally important thing to focus on. Therefore marketers are not just uploading a video, awaiting its wildly spread. When professionally carried out, the people behind campaigns are paying careful attention to the public, be it the people spreading the video to their friends, the newspapers mentioning the campaign, or politicians who gets more or less voluntarily involved. This for instance happened in one of my cases where a video was shown at a traffic conference in Sweden, resulting in several people walking out in protest. Such reactions had not happened in Denmark or any other countries, however, the Swedish people found it tasteless as sex and traffic security were mixed in the same campaign, since they are not mixing serious matters with unserious ones to the same extend that other cultures might do. This event caused the Swedish politicians to ask the equal rights minister in Denmark to account for the campaign. The involvement of political engagement caused the Danish newspapers to write and refer to the campaign, which in turn made people, otherwise not familiar with videos on Youtube, look for the video, since it suddenly became relevant, since it was part of the news on everyone’s lips.

Such an unexpected turn of events is both desirable and risky. Its desirable since not only single people but also hubs such at TV stations, journalist and politicians can boost the spreading/awareness. It’s risky when the attention a campaign gets so controversial that the original message drowns in the debate, or even worse; when it is being remembered in a negative and undesired way.

This calls for reconsideration of the implications in attempting to engage, yet still control, the public opinion, in particular when that engagement becomes global thereby transgressing national and cultural boundaries.

A guy asked my “Why marketing?”, as we were talking about viral marketing. “Why not advertising?” A very good question indeed…

I found an explanation of the two as follows:

Advertising: The paid, public, non-personal announcement of a persuasive message by an identified sponsor; the non-personal presentation or promotion by a firm of its products to its existing and potential customers.

Marketing: The systematic planning, implementation and control of a mix of business activities intended to bring together buyers and sellers for the mutually advantageous exchange or transfer of products.

The best way to distinguish between advertising and marketing is to think of marketing as a pie, inside that pie you have slices of advertising, market research, media planning, public relations, product pricing, distribution, customer support, sales strategy, and community involvement. Advertising only equals one piece of the pie in the strategy. All of these elements must not only work independently but they also must work together towards the bigger goal. Marketing is a process that takes time and can involve hours of research for a marketing plan to be effective. Think of marketing as everything that an organization does to facilitate an exchange between company and consumer.

This explanation broadens up the understanding, but it also puts into focus that the term “viral advertising” would be the strategy, but would probably not cover the carefully crafted campaign. Before the users are invited to engage with a campaign it had been seeded.

A viral video is not just put on the internet in order for people to find and spread it. It is being carefully places where it is most likely to be picked up by the group of people that are potential consumers of the brand, or the ones that are most likely to initiate spreading. The video is on purpose created so that it appears as if it is a natural reflection of everyday life (maybe enhanced in quality by the usage of a specific brand). But it is carefully crafted, performed by actors and mobilized by influential people and networks in order for the story to be staged right.

All this work is often rendered invisible when talking about the video and the reception of it. But I think that by changing the term from advertising to marketing it becomes clear that there is a lot more to it than just the advertisement and the people engaging with it. This puts into focus “The systematic planning and implementation“  in making viral marketing.

Another aspect that caught my attention was “control” since; when a video is being spread it is carefully monitord by professionals.  Often, in order to create awareness, the brand is not immediately revealed. Instead a small video, that provides the user with a story, is being distributed through the Internet. The video is on purpose created so that it appears as if it is a real story, but balancing of the edge between appearing as fake and real. This technique creates a sense of mystique, an ambiguity or a doubt in the viewers, that ideally should result in a discussion concerning the content as well as (as soon as the brand is revealed) the brand behind it. Often it is the users’ discussions, concerning whether something is real or not, as well as their creative contributions, that provide the campaign with a momentum thereby ensuring the first round of attention. Consequently, people share the videos with their friends in order to hear their opinions as well as formulating their own.

However, it is crucial to remember that the brand should be a part of this discussion. To initiate a successful campaign is great, but if the content is not being related with the specific brand is a waste of money for the company who hoped for brand awareness. But it is equally important not to over represent a brands visual appearance. This can potentially annoy the users and hinder that the content will appear to be authentic and real. This has turned out to be a challenging balance for many brands, but it also emphasize the need for control and monitoring while the story is being discussed, in order to decide when and it what way to reveal the brand behind the campaign. thus, control is a crusial part of managing to create a sucessful viral campaign.

That last part of the definition of marketing is “of a mix of business activities intended to bring together buyers and sellers for the mutually advantageous exchange or transfer of products“ Often we talk about a mix since viral marketing is not only about videos, but about being seen wherever people are. Creating awareness of a brand can be seen as cooperating. The reason viral marketing can succeed and the reason people voluntarily spread the word is because the users see their interests fulfilled too when engaging. They might not do it directly because they want to create brand awareness, but even though they do it to create identity or to strengthen their social network; they still have an interest that is compatible to the one of the people who wants to create brand awareness. Thus it can be said to be a mutually advantageous exchange.

And that, my dear readers, is my thoughts after having shared a glass of red wine with a man who asked a very simple question.

Dina/Live blogging from 4S (Society for Social Studies of Science) in Washington DC

Her er et interessant bachelorprojekt om konspirationsteorier som på mange måder minder om fænomenet viral marketing.

1) Det er vanskeligt at sige noget om hvorvidt folk ved mere end de giver udtryk for, når de diskuterer teorier så vel som virale videoer på Internettet

2) Virale videoer, såvel som konspirationsteorier, bør forstås i lyset af de impliceredes forskellige virkelighedsopfattelser

3) Begge fænomener kan være retoriske redskaber hvor de involverede parter giver udtryk for andet end det de egentlig tror for at skabe autoritet

4) Der er tale om fænomener der er så brede at det ikke giver mening at bruge hverken konspirationsteorier eller viral marketing uden at se på hvordan de praktiseret forskelligt i forskellige sammenhænge

I gotta blog about this!

It is successful viral marketing in the sense that half of the viewers of this particular video believes in it, while the half who do not.

The ones that find them self smart enough to have realized that this is just a viral stunt, still spreads the message about it.  Their foci might be to unravel what this is REALLY about, however, even doing so they make the stunt work… the news is out there, and soon we shall (that is, if we are curious enough to stay interested) find the real truth. Be it the father of the child, or the company behind a viral stunt…

The suspense is almost killing me…

Tell me about your strategies.

Do you post more than one tweet? Do you think the winner will be chosen due to his/ her tweet creativity or based on the amount of clicks our your tag that are made? On the popularity of your profile? Or the size of your network? Do you care? Do you balance mentioning the add with saying something you would have said anyway?

When posting a twitter message the extent to which the message about the new Mac Pro spreads fast. I am wondering of anyone are aware of the extent?

My message spreads to:

a)      All my twitter friends

b)      All my facebook friends

c)       All the readers on my blog

d)      Pages cached by Google, from my blog, where my “Show-twittering” widget is still showing that Tweet.

e)      The internet archive (way back machine) as it saves a version of my blog with the twittering visible.

 This is interesting when looking af Mac Pros new campaign:

“To participate in our birthday giveaway. All you need to do is include the #moonfruit tag in any tweet on twitter. You can be creative with your tweet or re-tweet our message, don’t forget to follow @moontweet to find out if you’ve won.”

This must be said to be highly internet born vira!

I wonder if anyone has twittered / blogged or won anything? If so, please share their thoughts about it.

Of, if not, if you would have considered the extent of the spreading of the add before twittering?

Did you consider this a personal gain as you can win? Did you act without thinking, or was there a completely well considered thought behind your decision to twitter it?

Also, Tell me about your strategies?

Do you post more than one tweet? Do you think the winner will be chosen due to his/ her tweet creativity or based on the amount of clicks our your link that are made? On the popularity of your profile? Or the size of your network? Do you care? Do you balance mentioning the add with saying something you would have said anyway?

Viral marketing in and around virtual worlds

Here is a short overview on my project. It does not contain many references, or theoretical considerations as such, but my hope is to give you an overview of the structure.
Let us take a look at what I mean by “viral marketing.” I will present the concept through an example, which will be referred to repeatedly throughout this document. The example is a video made by the Danish Traffic Council to get Danes, in particular young men between 18 and 35, to drive slower. It is available online at speedbandits.dk.

Empirically, I find four things interesting. Related to this is a few questions that I hope to provide answers for during my PhD.

1) The commercial sender (Danish Traffic Council).

How does the council manage to get people to distribute the video? How do they manage to target young men between 18 and 35?

2) The object traveling (in this case the video).

When the video travels, the message “Drive more slowly” travels with it. But how does the message survive rather than drowning in the entertainment? What is the relationship between the entertainment and the message from the commercial sender? How are they being balances off? What challenges does this imply for the sender?

3) The people receiving and forwarding the object. (every one that have watched the video (perhaps even you if you followed the link), as well as everyone that told other people about it (including me :-))

How does the video influence its viewers? In particular, how can it manage to change driving habits? And what motivates people to pass it on to others?

4) The digital environment. (The “context” in which the object is present influences its seriousness as well as the means for spreading it, for instance Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube)

How do the digital environments influence the object? Would it make a difference whether the video is only uploaded to the homepage or if it is posted on Youtube? Would it be announced elsewhere? And for what reasons would it be chosen to use one platform over another?

The project is split into two parts. Points 1 and 2 are being discussed in the first part dealing with objects as well as their creation. The second part consists of the hosts i.e. the human and nonhuman actors facilitating the spreading of the object.

1+2) The object

The object is relevant to look at in viral marketing as it is in the hands of users.
The commercial sender might have a specific aim, i.e. making people slow down. They might have a specific group of people they want to change behavior in, i.e. young men between 18 and 35. But as soon as the video is ready to be put on the internet the commercial sender is no longer in direct control of the spreading, the responses or the effects the video might have on its audience.

This means that a lot of work must be done beforehand. For instance it is chosen to integrate topless women into the traffic video in order to catch the attention of the young men. It is also chosen when and where to start the spreading. Considering who might be most likely to spread it, leaving a pamphlet with the URL to the homepage in a nursing home where mostly old people without internet and drivers license will not be a success, where as having a link to the site on a sports site announcing the latest results for FORMULA 1 might be more likely to hit the target audience of young men.

Theoretically there are two things I want to look at: The distinction between subject and object, and the distinction between mediators and intermediates.
The first is inspired by Marilyn Stratherns cutting the network article, and her critique of ANTs removal of distinctions. She argues that there might be sites where a distinction does not exist at all, for instance in PNG where Yams and shells are not objects but instead extensions of the subject.
I find the discussion concerning the analytical categories of objects and subjects useful when looking at the object (the video for instance). What can we learn about the character of the object? Can we benefit from seeing it as an object travellng and an extension of the subject passing it on? (i.e. would a video that otherwise would have been deleted be watched because it came from someone the receiver knew?)

Two additional analytical tools that I want to use are Latour’s concepts mediators and intermediaries. These are two ways of explaining mediations, thus not distinguishing between humans and nonhuman but instead by the character of the mediations. I will use this to look at the strategies available to the commercial sender before publishing the video on the internet. His or her ideas of what digital environments as well as users to take advantage of.

Theoretically I will look into Roger’s “Diffusion of innovation”, a theory of spreading that ANT is writing up against. (I have not gotten around to this yet, but this will be one of my next reading projects, as I intend it to be one of my central theoretical starting points.)

3+4) The hosts

Responsible for objects to be spread are hosts. These can be the humans, but also the different digital environments as they both facilitate the spreading.

The humans
I will take the object as a kind of boundary object, with an assumption that there exist several simultaneous interests and motivations. Whereas it might be quite clear what the aim from the perspective of the commercial sender is, the interests of the people passing on the video to others might differ. One might do it just because it is funny, another might never do it, except this one time where it has a special meaning. (For instance one might send the speed video to a young guy that just got his drivers license, or someone that moves away from Denmark, just to tease them with what they miss back home.) This approach can explain the success of viral marketing as several things at the same time and provide an explanation for why people pass it around ( The boundary object is strong and manages to stay the same across many sites) But it can also be used to raise questions as to how the commercial creator managed to create is. (There is however no writings concerning HOW one can create such a boundary object)

Digital environments
When the commercial sender chooses where to plant a seed i.e. where to start spreading the video s/he must take into consideration the different environments. Nancy Baym has been studying fan culture on the internet and concludes that often there exists many fan sites for the same bands. However it makes a big difference to which of these communities you belong. Furthermore the infrastructure affects the spreading in different ways. If a user is posting something on Facebook, all his or her friend will get this message. If instead the user sends a video to friends in an email no one but the friends it was sent to will see it. Here I will look at visibility and access. This calls for methodological considerations as to what accesses I can get as a researcher as well as knowledge about how objects can be spread differently depending on the different infrastructures.

Concerning the digital environments I have a project affiliation meaning that I will have to put a special focus on virtual worlds. This combined with my claim to do multisided ethnography calls for considerations concerning how I can approach a virtual world as a site.
When focusing on viral marketing from the perspective of the object, I will pay less attention to the digital environment, whereas when focusing on the hosts, I will pay attention to the different digital environments. But what is an environment and how do I define it?

For instance, World of Warcraft (WoW) is a virtual world whereas Facebook is a social networking site. The primary difference lies in the users being immersed in a world, with 3D representations of them. They are represented by avatars and interaction will often contain items, rules and values existing inside the digital environment (For instance in world of Warcraft and Age of Conan, one is playing a role and rules, ranks and skills will be determined by the game creators). A social networking site will be used as extensions of real world relations. People will be represented as “themselves” with pictures, and input from their lives outside this environment
However there are in-betweens. Second life is a virtual world, the users have to use an avatar and they can be anonymous, living a life in there without any references to the life outside the world. Users can also use this world as an extension of real life relations meeting in there, chatting, or building things. In contrast to WoW there are very few rules. Second Life is more to be seen as an environment where there are tools for building in 3D as well as scripting actions, buying clothes, chatting etc. So an aim that perhaps has more theoretical relevance is to define what would make sense to call a virtual world and consider where lines can be drawn between them and social networking sites. This is not only a question of making analytical distinctions, but also about exploring where these lines are drawn empirically and if they are being challenged or if disagreements about them exist.

Two concepts used to describe users are Immersionist or Augmentationist. Whereas the first group would have an identity not linked to the identity outside the environment, the latter would see it as an extension of their real life identity.

There are other forms of interaction that calls for delimitation: Consider WoW users discussing on a message board or on a wall in a Facebook group. Is this part of a virtual world as these people are discussing things concerning WoW? Are they to be seen as avatars? Or is this kind of discussion to be characterized as social networking?

I hope this has given you an intuition about what I am about to call a project :-)

References:

Baym Nancy K. (2007) “The new shape of online community: The example of Swedish independent music fandom” First Monday, volume 12, number 8 (August 2007)
URL: http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_8/baym/index.html

Bowker, Geoffrey & Star, Susan Leigh (1999) ”What a Difference a Name Makes – The Classification of Nursing Work” in Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences. Chapter 7. The MIT Press: London, England & Cambridge, MA.

Callon, Michel & Law, John (1995) “Agency and the hybrid collectif”, South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 94 pp.481-507.

Callon, Michel (1999) “Actor-Network Theory – the market test”. Side 181-195 i Law, John og Hassard, John (ed.): Actor-Network Theory and After. Blackwell Publishers/The Sociological Review: Oxford.)

Latour, Bruno (2005) “Reassembling the Social: an Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory.” Oxford: Clarendon

Latour, Bruno (1999) “Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society”, (1987) Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Latour, Bruno (1987) Science in Action. How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,. (pp. 103-144)

Latour, Bruno. (1986) “The Powers of Association”. Power, Action and Belief. A new sociology of knowledge? Sociological Review monograph 32. Law, J. (Ed). Routledge & Kegan Paul, London: 264-280.

Star, Susan Leigh, and James R. Griesemer (1989). “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translation,’ and Boundary Objects – Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-1939.” Social Studies of Science 19 (1989): 387-420.

Strathern, Marilyn (1996) “Cutting the Network”. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 2, No. 3. (1996), pp. 517-535.

As it turns out the video that played mind games with my brain in the last post was a spoof add.

However, this challenges my definition of viral marketing.

Where should I put these spoof adds? Will I always be able to tell the difference between adds and spoof adds?

Will it be used as a marketing strategy? I.e. a company creating a user on youtube, and then letting “him/her” published adds under the official pretence that it is spoof.

Will this perhaps motivate users to spread the word, about the add, where as they would not have been likely to do the same, had they known it to be a real commercial?

Am I too paranoid?

I think this challenges the concept of visibility in viral marketing.
The chances are that viral marketing will be made to look like information about viral marketing.
One example is this video pretending to be a newscast concerning the Danish traffic situation, whereas it really is a campaign aiming at making young Danish guys pay more attention to speed limits.

And what about a video created to make the world aware of a youtube users skills as video creator, that turns out to make the world aware on some product (Kitkat for instance) instead?
Ps. A small howto should anyone be interested…

Speaking of two things that both have my interest (Second Life and commercials on the internet), where is the relevance between the (somewhat cool) video, and the product for which it advertises?

I am wondering who would be passing this around, as well as their motivations for doing so?

I wonder if people, 30 days after having watched it, would remember the video but not the product?

And I would love to find more advertisements where the product in principle could have been anything in the world without this making any difference to the story of the video. (Please post links if you find any :-))