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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.