Viral Content... For College Credit?
from the seriously? dept
How college education has changed.... Apparently, over in the UK, there's an effort underway to teach college art and design students how to make viral emails. The program seems to be related to some contest -- and it's not entirely clear from the article how the contest and the classroom lessons are related. However, it does show how the concept of "viral content" is now being considered something of a legitimate artform to some. Of course, the thing that is left out is that the best viral content is often quite unintentional. The more you try to make viral content on purpose, the worse it often gets. That's not to say that there hasn't been successfully planned viral content, but for every successful attempt, the list of failures is long and, well, often quite sad.
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Uuugh!
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If this is legitimized...
If legitimized, I suppose in a few years one could purchase a monthly magazine detailing how current businesses are creating viral content. It would be one part social engineering, two parts silly pictures, another part on current IMAP/POP3 vulnerabilitie/open SMTP relays, and three parts business results- how everyone from the CEO down would support it
I would be so bold as to ask if I could I venture a guess that the publication may be titled "Harvard Spam Review"
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Virals in the classroom
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Re: Virals in the classroom
That's a pretty heavy industry!
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Viral crappage
Duh
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Viral =/= Virus !
The story is about 'viral emails'. These are NOT VIRUS-emails, but normal emails:
They usually point to an internet page (or have an attachment in the form of an image, a video clip, powerpoint presentation...) and they only spread because the receiver explicitly forwards the mail.
They do not contain coding of any kind to automatically spread!!
The basic example is to send an email to someone with an url of a funny clip somewhere on the internet. If the receiver agrees and finds this clip equally enjoyable, he/she may send it on to other people etc.
The next step is to create an image / clip that people want to forward to each other, witch includes a positive message about "brand x".
That's viral advertising: let the public be the messenger!
And I don't have any problems whatsoever with a college class about how to make these. Not more than that I have any objections to classes in advertising in general, anyway.
Look at the bright side: because of these classes they may actually get better. Besides, I don't think that the success-rate of 'planned viral content' is that much lower than the succes-rate of any other advertising...
Practise makes perfect :-D
And Mike, maybe it's not that much of an art-form, but that's the same way I think about a lot of art these days :-)
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Re: Viral =/= Virus !
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spam!!morespam!!
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"viral content? you mean spam? I hate teh spam! I hope the virus doesn't ruin my spreadsheet."
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"viral content? you mean spam? I hate teh spam! I hope the virus doesn't ruin my spreadsheet."
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for those of you confused, multimillion pound...that's brittish money, not weight.
i have no problem with a class on digital advertising. advertising is supposed to generate money. if you put x ammount of money into your ads, and return with y more you just generated money, the goal of business. yes you may alienate your consumer base, but that's a risk with any advert.
but when does this viral ad become a spam? one would hope these ads would be sent by reputable companies with real links that would remove you from their list, and not have your info sold to other firms.
only time will tell
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Re:
It isn't spam. The idea of creating viral advertising is creating advertisements that are actually cool enough for somebody to send to some friends. This blog points to an article that uses the Star Wars Kid as an example. People sent this all over because it was funny. It isn't about a company sending an e-mail with information to a giant list of people, it's creating advertisements that people decide is worth sending to other people they know, who in turn send it to people they know. It is like word of mouth, but with the internet..
If it's good or entertaining or useful enough, people will spread those ads for your company.
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We've been had!
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Re: We've been had!
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Aka...
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widecircles
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Viral Content
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Duleeka.
Did anyone out there give a try to Wide Circles or WideCircles. They are new word of mouth advertising platform, apparently they can push massive amount of messages through social network mediums like forums,blogs,wiki's and so on. They say that they only bill for posts active for minimum of 5 days and price seems pretty affordable. I am going to give Wide Circles aka WideCircles a try since I am tired of PPC fraud. http://widecircles.com
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