An article recently published by the Wall Street Journal details Trident Gum’s difficulties in creating a viral marketing campaign that can catch traction among the web-savvy. The campaign consists of a series of online videos shot with a $300 home video camera and posted to the website of a comedian named Martin Mull. The videos are of a fictional TV show called “That’s Not Fake”, which depicts the lives of Jerry and Wendell Tucker. These two brothers test the strength of Jerry’s teeth by smashing them with a bowling ball, amongst other wince-inducing tests. The tape is then determined by “That’s Not Fake” to be a fraud because Jerry used performance enhancing gum to give his teeth superhuman strength. Sounds funny enough, right? So why has it failed to catch on?

An article in the Economist seeks to shed some light on the principles that make a viral marketing campaign successful. The success of a viral marketing campaign is based on its ability to spread quickly to as many people as possible. Such campaigns have been born out of the internet, which provides the ultimate network in which a virus can thrive, a network of more than one billion unique users. However, the existence of this network alone does not mean that viral marketing is easy. The internet has so much information, that our attention is constantly being fought for by thousands of organizations all hoping to come up with the next “Hotmail campaign”, the classic example of a successful viral marketing campaign. The success of Hotmail was built out of a simple advertisement attached to the bottom of every email sent through the service that said “Get your private, free email from hotmail at www.hotmail.com”. Although basic, the ad was successful because each time a user sent an email, this advertisement was spread….for free. In more recent years, viral marketing campaigns have gotten much more complex, often including videos on YouTube and clubs on social networking sites such as Facebook. But the underlying principles behind a viral marketing campaign are the same. Just as a virus needs a host to spread, so does a viral marketing campaign and the most effective way to spread the ideas in such a campaign are by using those hosts with the highest social networking potential (SNP). The value of a person’s SNP is based on two simple factors: the size of their online social network and their power to influence that network.

The reason that these two factors should determine the effectiveness of a viral marketing campaign is largely due to social influence. The focus in this case would be the idea that the organization is trying to propagate through its marketing campaign. Interestingly, we learned that the probability of joining a LiveJournal community or editing a Wikipedia article can be more than doubled when the number of connections into the focus increases from one to two. This suggests that another very important principle that viral marketers should take into consideration is whether or not they have multiple people targeting any given person and influencing them to make a connection with the focus.

Perhaps Trident’s marketing campaign has not caught on because they promoted it by emailing dental hygienists and bloggers who are fans of Martin Mull, the comedian whose website hosts the videos. They also posted information about ThatsNotFake.com on dental forums and TV websites. In order to make their campaign more successful, Trident could look at specifically targeting people with high SNPs. Additionally, they could look at targeting sources who have overlapping friends in order to increase the probability that network closure is occurring.