User Generated Marketing
The reason that a viral marketing 2.0 campaign can be so powerful is because of its democratic character. If the content of the campaign appeals to users, the next thing you know, they are doing much of your marketing for you. In other words, viral marketing 2.0 is about user generated distribution. You provide a solid brand experience, and your target market proliferates it for you.
This, in turn, has lead to a new way by which marketers can gage the success of their exploits. As Mitch Joel has pointed out, first you measure how much users helped proliferate your brand experience, and then you count "how many new iterations are created out of the original and how far and wide those spin-offs spread." Well it seems that this phenomenon has led to marketers skipping right past creating their own viral content, and skipping straight into having the user do so.
Just recently, the people behind the Broadway musical "Spring Awakening" have launched a viral campaign that invites users to manipulate the content of the original production. Basically, teenagers are being encourage to use music from the musical to depict their own experience with teenaged angst. In other words, they are putting material that has traditionally been protected under copyright law under a creative commons licence so that it can enjoy the full viral benefits of user generated content.As the press release explains:
New York, NY (PRWEB) April 26, 2007 -- The hit Broadway musical "Spring Awakening" has come to the Eyespot (http://www.springawakening.com/) media playground to present an opportunity for fans of the show to create video mashups expressing their teenage angst by using songs and video from the show, including the tracks "Bitch of Living" and "Totally F**cked," coupled with their own memorabilia to create the ultimate dedication to the difficulties of being a teenager.
Popularized by a video mashup created by Rosie O'Donnell (http://www.eyespot.com/promotion/springawakening/) , a champion of the production, the contest encourages fans to create their own mashups from scenes in the play and its hit musical numbers written by famed singer/songwriter Duncan Sheik.
The new video and audio clips can be mixed and modified with Eyespot's browser based mashup tool so that fans don't have to download clunky software or learn new skills to create new videos from their favorite parts of the show, their own web cams, or from the community's vast pool of movie, television, and music clips.
As the Eyespot page explains, moreover, the winning video "will be used as part of our official 'Spread The Word' web banners for thousands to see as well as a posting on the show's official website." In other words, contestant vie to have their semi-original creations to become popular so that they can win the privilege of having that creation further disseminated.
It's no wonder that conventional marketers and advertisers are resisting the Web 2.0 phenomenon and its user generated content. Just like file sharing has jeopardized the record labels grasp of a medium, user generated content is displacing content that was traditionally post-production intensive. Indeed, the democratization of the media is moving forward at an alarming rate. That doesn't mean, however, that marketing and advertising agencies and executives need to worry. It just means that they have to adapt to an evloving landscape. If anything, their job didn't get more difficult; it got easier, and all they have to do now is think of their markets not as consumers, but as users, and ask themselves what they themselves would want if they were using their own brand experience.
