good find Mack, very interesting. Looks to me like the fiskateers is what the priceless.com site wanted to be, except the fiskateers is more engaging and has a blog.

I'm going to push back on your idea of marketing going viral idea though. I think Viral reffers to a much simpler, less rich, and less sustainable interaction. Viral tend to have enormous peaks and huge drop off, they are generally based on surprise or shock, and therefore tend to not be something we keep going back to, once you've seen most virals you're innoculated, someone sends it to you again in a month and yout think "oh that was so last month".

What the fiskateers is, is better than viral, it's sustainable, and grows more valuable over time.

I see it more as, let's give our marketing some of the characteristics of a good viral marketing campaign. Let's make our marketing easily spread, let's give our community an incentive to spread that message. But that can't happen overnight, because it relies on companies taking the time to embrace, empower, and join their communities, and give them their just due input in the marketing message.

Bottom line is, let's don't worry about creating the next 'viral video', and instead make it as easy as possible for our community to become evangelists for our product. Let's acknowledge that they too have some ownership in our marketing message, and give them their due. If we treat them with respect, they will spread that message to others, and will help convert other community members into evangelists. It's all about rewarding the existing community members that are already marketing for you, and empowering them to spread their message to others.

It all comes back to embracing, empowering, and joining your community. Treat them with respect, and give them a sense of ownership in the brand they are willingly promoting to others.

Nice post, Mack.

I'd agree with Karl on the definition of viral marketing. Basically, community marketing is 'sustainable viral marketing'.

As you rightly point out, focusing on the long-term benefits of a community marketing campaign far overrides the short-term benefits of a flaky, one-time viral campaign, since you're focused on your most valuable asset - your customer!

"Basically, community marketing is 'sustainable viral marketing'."

Exactly, but effective community-based marketing is difficult to impossible unless a company takes the time to immerse themselves in their community, and not many companies are willing to do that. As Spike mentioned with the Fiskateers story, there was about 4 months of 'prep' time before that movement was launched.

The idea is, have as much interaction with your community as possible, and find every way possible to empower the members that are already evangelising your brand. Your marketing will become more efficient as the community is able to give their input, and those evangelists will help convert fellow community members into evangelists as well.

An excellent example of this type of 'viral' evangelism is the story of how Bill Samuels 'marketed' Maker's Mark. I just wrote a post about it at The Viral Garden here: http://moblogsmoproblems.blogspot.com/2006/08/marketing-without-fingerprints.html

And you can listen to the podcast, which as I told Jackie is the best one I've ever heard, here: http://customerevangelists.typepad.com/podcast/2006/01/interview_with_.html

Just like you can't work to be cool, you can't work to be viral. You either are, or you aren't.

I too see the reality in the definition here of viral marketing. It is going to take time to see where this shift in communication lands us -- and there are decisions that have to be made along the way. What do you think?