Your Guess Is As Good As Theirs When It Comes To Viral Video

from the making-stuff-up dept

While plenty of companies are turning their attention to online viral or word-of-mouth marketing, many are having a hard time grasping the lack of metrics the medium offers. Not that these metrics are necessarily important in and of themselves, but rather because these companies are used to having readily trackable metrics -- after all, the relatively easy viewer tracking (assuming the numbers can be trusted, of course) is one reason that's fueling the shift in ad spending to online media like banner and text ads. If nothing else, the metrics allow individuals to justify their actions to their superiors, and for departments and companies to justify their strategies. But while it's easy to see how many people clicked through an ad and eventually bought a product or performed some other action, it's very difficult to measure the effectiveness of viral marketing efforts. A spate of recent stories about the popularity of certain online videos illustrated this. The company behind the rankings presented them as an "official" list of popularity, and plenty of reporters bought into the press release unquestioningly. In truth, though, the figures are little more than a guess. By their very nature, it's impossible to know how many people watched a particular video as it got passed around by email, posted on different web sites, and so on. So the researchers used a, frankly, bizarre methodology involving Google search results, surveys with small and non-random samples, and some "assumptions" and "insight" -- or, to you and me, guesses. That's how, for instance, they say the Star Wars Kid video was viewed 900 million times (keep in mind another research firm that's generally better known and more credible, says that the total online population of people 15 and older is about 730 million). But what's perhaps a bigger problem is that they've got simply no idea how many people have seen the videos -- from a marketing perspective, that number's more important than overall views, particularly since with viral marketing, companies don't really incur any marginal costs as the audience grows. This isn't to say that the internet is in dire need of a way to trace viewership of viral videos and other word-of-mouth marketing efforts; but rather that marketers need to worry less about the individual metrics and more on their cumulative, overall effect.