A whole new industry has sprung up, dedicated to unravelling what makes viral ads infectious. GoViral, for instance, specialises in launching viral campaigns – in part by ”seeding” clips on the web in places where they are picked up by the online populace.

Consumers are becoming increasingly immune to mass marketing and advertising, so viral marketing offers something that doesn’t feel like they are being sold to, making them more receptive to the offer.

What once was much a matter of luck is slowly being transformed into a science. Jimmy Maymann, the group’s chairman, has built a polling system, ”which every campaign is taken through prior to launch in order ensure virality”.

The ideal campaign is edgy, surprising, original, erotic and emotional – and taps into popular culture, he says. His system attempts to quantify these elements.

Prime Example of a highly successful viral campaign is Nike.  Their  clip is one of the all time greatest virals ever, with more than 50 million views globally. Featuring world famous soccer star Ronaldinho hitting the crossbar no less than four times, without the ball touching the floor. The creative material is from Framfab, in Denmark. The product on display is the Nike R10 football boot. A massive discussion on whether the clip was actually real or computer edited drove millions of interested viewers to the campaign.

Framfab won two Gold Lions on the Cannes Lions Festival for the campaign. The other winning clip was The Chain, a user generated initiative, consisting of more than 500 user uploaded soccer sequences edited together as one long clip of soccer celebration.

Another strong campaign and a favourite of mine was the one with the John West employee fighting a grizzly bear off to land a fish – just to go that extra mile for quality. Obviously, it is set up, but with costumes from the Jim Henson Creature Shop it looks surprisingly real, until the bear starts throwing Kung Fu tricks at the “fisherman”.

An unusual viral, it created more than 300 million views and has won ten awards, including Best Commercial of the Year from British Television Advertising Awards and a Gold Lion at the Cannes Lions Festival, 2001. Executed by Leo Burnett, the viral brings together the best of advertising and content in one.

Showing that efforts to increase brand awareness without selling anything can actually work.  Bearing in mind that it’s important to provide an incentive that encourages others to spread the word about your product, quickly and inexpensively with little effort on your part.  This creates potentially exponential growth in the message’s visibility and effect.

Enlisting a niche Online Marketing Strategies firm specializing in Online PR and Online Community Development in your viral marketing campaign will result in effective viral marketing strategies for brands, resulting in significant online audience development.

1. Shortage of time and resources
2. Lack of in-house knowledge of how to engage online
influencers and how to interact on social networks
3. Keeping up to date with the pace of trends and
technology

Having recognised a shortage of in-house skills, businesses are turning to specialist companies for help with their online PR and reputation management strategies, with 56% of respondents saying that they wanted to employ a specialist Online Reputation Management Company.

As well as this, 93% of those businesses surveyed agreed that “online PR and reputation management will become more important over the next 5 years.”

Undeniably.

With 71m Europeans accessing the internet via their mobile each week, 121m people using broadband and 46% of homes owning at least one laptop, their is obvious impetus for European businesses to jump on the bandwagon and invest of digital PR.

In addition, and particularly more interesting, is the fact that Eastern European countries are expected to see increasing internet pentration. Polish people already spend more time browsing the web on their mobiles than any other nationality, 10.3 hours a week on average.  As accurately put by Alison Fennah, executive director of the European Interactive Advertising Association (EIAA), the study provides a “compelling case for brands to explore” and incorporate a growing number of complemetary interactive platforms into the marketing mix and public relations strategy.  She goes on further to highlight that “mobile is the only medium” you can plan regionally in a properly centralised way.

The most recent player to hone their skills is the BBC.  The latest announcement coming from the corporation is that they are set to shift their positioning on the web with a slashing of online content by half as it tightens its focus.  Less generic content and more links to external sites is the drive.  It will halve the size of bbc.co.uk by closing lower performing sites and reduce its budget and staff by a quarter by 2012.  Digital radio stations 6Music and BBC Asian Network will also close.

Is this something to consider?  Does it pay to have more focused online endeavours? Well, in a word, yes.  This is evident in the BBC’s iPlayer recording of 120m requests for TV and radio shows in January, boosted by Christmas catch-ups and cold weather.  According to the BBC, the online service accounted for 100m requests.  More than 20m views came from its distribution deals with broadcasters such as Virgin Media and gaming companies Nintendo – which now accounts for 4% of requests – and Playstation at 8%.

So the key to online success.  Give your key demographics exactly what they want. Not to mention some nifty public relations work.

The partnership is currently on track with the phase one development of a media mapping system that creates visual representations of the news and information landscape for a range of industries.  Once completed the technology will be adapted to deliver a raft of real-time media monitoring, promotional and advertising applications to clients in Scotland and the UK.

Not only this but cross media PR and marketing campaigns have such great potential for public relations consultancies as brands are increasingly calling for a joined-up approach to corporate communications, seeing their core message deployed across every possible channel in an integrated manner.

“Our system will target customers that need an affordable, easy to use solution that will work in the most varied of public environments. These range from dynamic wayfinding signs to digital posters, menus, maps, realtime info-graphics, transport schedules and twitter streams,” said YUVa founder Dan Roy.

YUVa – whose clients have included BBC Scotland, The Lighthouse and the Scottish Symphony Orchestra – will work with Scotland’s leading Digital PR agency on delivering a number of proof-of-concept and practical digital signage applications for clients.  According to many reports the market for out of home digital advertising is set to grow rapidly over the next few years, with once recent analysis predicting that the global market will enjoy an annual growth rate of over 26.8% between now an 2013.

What a smart move!

However, at this point, Google Buzz is designed to be used by people more than companies. Nevertheless, just like Facebook ended up creating Business Pages for companies to use instead of personal profiles, Google Buzz may in the future create some sort of business account to make a better way for businesses to interact in the community. Given these limitations, there are still some useful tips for getting started on marketing and digital PR using Google Buzz.

A key tip being thrown around is find people in your industry, and follow them. Following more people gives Google Buzz a better idea of what you like and don’t like, and it does encourage other people to follow you back because they do get notified that you followed them. Note: right now you can only use Google Buzz on Android phones and iPhones, so you may need to wait to get started on this.

More interesting, Google has already started to put social status updates into search results, and they recently launched social search. All this means that even if you think everyone you sell to will never use social media, you still need to have a presence in social media as a company. Building a larger presence in social media and using social media to promote your content will help you rank more often in plain old search results (which are no longer so “plain” or “old”), which is important for every company.

Interesting. Isn’t it just?

Martinson reports: “SMS and Facebook were used as mobilising tools, Twitter to provide up to the minute feeds on where the action was alongside an interactive map. Videos and photographs were uploaded in near to real-time, but not live, to provide unmediated reports on what was taking place. In short, it was close to being an alternative news supplier blurring the lines even further between citizen journalism and reportage. User generated content has already changed the nature of newsgathering in providing first-hand accounts into mediated mainstream news providers. But what operations like climate.camp.org does is to provide an alternative news source that is, by definition, authentic but, as in common on the web, without any checks of accuracy and verification. And it ticks more than one box. The content is relevant for its audiences, it provides a means of engagement, it is updated and some of the related videos can be chilling or hilarious.”

Like it or not, stories like this demonstrate precisely why local authorities and public sector organisations must start sharpening up their approach to online public relations.

Disputing the popular view that it is a discipline that should be standalone channel or function in the marketing mix, Jonty contends that rather than being simply another channel, social media has taken on a platform role alongside traditional media such as television or print.

Neatly summing up the nub of the matter, he puts it thus:

“Let’s be frank, before the term ‘earned media’ became a buzzword amongst the social media crew, it’s essentially exactly what PR agencies have been doing for decades. Public relations (much wider than media relations alone) is all about connecting a brand to its audiences, using media pitching to create free publicity (earned media), events and one-to-one interactions to drive word of mouth and brand engagement (sound familiar?), the influencing of opinion leaders (ditto) and the creation of public campaigns to educate and affect perception of target consumers about the brand (still with me?).”

Back in sunny Scotland, that’s precisely the line of thought we followed when setting up Revolver. Whatever you call it (from digitally-enabled public relations to plain old Digital PR) the practice of engaging with the social media has to be driven by the same communications principles and techniques you’d apply to any PR campaign.

That social media is different kind of animal is true. That it requires a slightly different approach and skill set is also true. Apart from that the old school media rules still apply, and any organisation that loses sight of that essential principle runs the risk of blundering into a PR crisis of their own making.

Says blogger Toni O’Sullivan: “There’s no doubt that online communication tools such as Twitter, social networking and blogs are all part of society today, but so are conversations at bus stops, in coffee shops and in people’s homes. These face-to-face conversations are driven by information from print newspapers, TV and word of mouth news and views. We’ve got to remember that not everyone spends their day connected to the Internet.

“The distinction between web-based and more traditional information sharing sources is definitely blurring. PROs and Marketers must remember that it’s essential to understand the target audience you are trying to reach and ensure you include the correct media channels in order to reach them. That means being aware of all online and offline channels, and with increasingly rapid technology advances there’s plenty to keep up to date with. It’s an exciting time and one that PROs should embrace in its entirety rather than focusing on one area alone.”

Hats off to Ms O’Sullivan for spotting this one. We’ve always believed that while crucially important, Digital PR is only part of the public relations mix. In a multimedia world, good PR must work across all channels.

Year on year business giants are moving away from sites created on a campaign-by-campaign basis in favour of investment in existing communities.  Yet is this the right move?  As the digital marketers Econsultancy highlight, your social media weapons should be selected by your strategy, objectives, and overall business structure.  And not use something just to look cool.  Doesn’t that sound familiar?  We all remember when Skittles, jumping on the social media bandwagon, replaced their official website with a Twitter search page showing, in real time, every Tweet mentioning Skittles.  Ok this seems like a pretty cool idea until you consider the deadly combination of cheap internet, short attention spans, and that thirst for internet fame.  It didn’t take long before the page devolved into profanities, racial slurs, and suggestions for crude new slogans. Needless to say Skittles soon resumed regular service.

It goes without saying that it is extremely beneficial to hone your social media skills by continuously educating yourself and by reviewing your existing strategies, not to mention having an exceptionally experienced public relations team behind you.