The New Ice Age: Lessons Learned from the ALS Challenge for Achieving Viral Marketing Success

If you have been online in the past few weeks, you have undoubtedly come across the viral phenomenon that is the “Ice Bucket Challenge”. Videos of people dumping buckets of ice-cold water on themselves, recording the video and posting to social media, and then nominating others to do the same, has taken the Internet by storm. Anyone who refuses to accept the challenge is asked to make a donation to the ALS charity of their choice, and the viral sensation as a whole has also raised significant awareness for ALS, which is often called Lou Gehrig’s disease. Fire up your social media site of choice and you are bound to see video after video of your friends and contacts dousing themselves in ice-cold H20. Even if you are not a big social media user, you have likely seen information on this freezing cold phenomenon as news outlets have gleefully reported on, and posted videos of, celebrities from the worlds of sports, entertainment, business, and more participating in the fun. A recent video even had actor Vin Diesel nominate Russian president Vladimir Putin to take the challenge! It seems as if everyone has happily dumped a bucket of water on their head for charity and good fun. The success of this campaign, which has raised millions of dollars, as well as that aforementioned awareness, for the ALS Association, is an interesting case study in the concept of “viral marketing”. In this article, we will take a look at what this Ice Bucket Challenge can teach us about this type of potentially powerful marketing.

You never know what will go viral.

The concept of the Ice Bucket Challenge is pretty simple. You film yourself doing something silly (and somewhat uncomfortable) and you challenge others you know to do the same. Pretty straightforward – so what makes this such a craze? What does this campaign have that so many other campaigns that were hoping to “go viral” were missing? The truth may actually just be dumb luck, because the reality is that you never know what will find an audience and go viral. Many organizations that try to initiate a viral campaign try many different ideas hoping that they will strike gold with one. They do this because they know that even one viral sensation can be all they need to meet their goals, whether that goal is to raise awareness for a cause like the ALA Association is doing, or to just draw massive attention to a business or a product, similar to what Burger King did many years ago (and what they are trying to do again) with their Subservient Chicken campaign. Viral marketing is really a roll of the dice, but there are some things that can tip the odds in your favor. We can see some of these things at play here in the Ice Bucket Challenge, including the presence of celebrities.

Celebrities sell.

The Ice Bucket challenge has now been taken by celebrities including Bill Gates, Ben Affleck, Justin Timberlake, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Jimmy Fallon, Oprah Winfrey, and Charlie Sheen (who mixed it up by dumping cold hard cash on his head instead of cold water – although he promised to donate all that cash to the ALS Association). The participation of celebrities, who then in turn nominate other celebrities, is absolutely one of the reasons why this Ice Bucket Challenge has blown up the way that it has. Their participation is what has driven news outlets to cover the videos, which prompts others to share those videos on social media. This in turn introduces the campaign to more people, who then do the challenge as well and nominate others. This is the very definition of “going viral”, and these celebs are helping to fuel that success! Compare the Ice Bucket Challenge to another “video for a good cause” from some years back – the Pink Glove Dance. Created by Providence St. Vincent Medical Center in Portland, Oregon, this video of medical staff dancing to raise awareness for breast cancer has been watched almost 14 million times on YouTube. That is amazing by any standard. If you asked any company if they would take 14 million views for one of their online videos and the answer, I am sure, would be a resounding “YES!”. Still, as popular as that video was, it pales in comparison to the reach that this Ice Bucket Challenge has found, largely because of that aforementioned celebrity involvement. So if celebrities can make your viral campaign, how do you go about getting them involved? Well, that’s the trick, you really can’t get them involved, it just has to happen! This is an important factor to realize, because if you are looking at the success of a viral campaign like the Ice Bucket Challenge and thinking, “How can we do something similar”, you need to realize that there is a “lightning in a bottle” aspect to what is happening here. You could do something identical and not find that audience that pushes it to this level. Yes, celebrities can make your viral campaign, but counting on them to participate is not a sound marketing strategy!

There is value in the ridiculous

One of the other factors that has contributed to the success of this campaign is the sheer ridiculousness of the act of dumping cold water on yourself. The Internet loves spectacle and the Ice Bucket Challenge delivers on that count! A successful viral campaign is often over the top and ridiculous. If you are considering trying you hand at a viral campaign, think outside the box and be willing to get a little crazy. When it comes to viral marketing, conservative rarely succeeds.

There is value in helping others.

Another factor helping fuel the success of the Ice Bucket challenge is that all of this silliness is for a great cause. While a viral campaign to promote a company or product may take off, one that is designed to help others has something that those others do not – good will. Doing good for others makes people feel good too. That is a powerful force that you can take advantage of if your viral campaign is for a good cause. With the Ice Bucket Challenge, many of the people who took the challenge also decided to donate to the cause. This combination of silliness and charity is something that has helped make this campaign what is has become.

Make it easy to participate.

Many viral campaigns require other people to get involved. The Ice Bucket Challenge has succeeded because so many people, celebs and normal folk alike, have recorded a video and posted it for the world to see. The key to this audience participation is making it easy to do! Take the example of the Pink Glove Dance again. After that initial video went viral, many other organizations recorded their own Pink Glove Dance videos, but none of them ever came close to matching the success of the original. One of the reasons is because there was not the massive flood of videos that we see happening with the Ice Bucket Challenge. This is absolutely because to the level of effort required to produce one of those dance videos, which includes a cast of dancers, music, editing, etc. Compare that to the Ice Bucket video, which only requires a cell phone camera and a bucket of ice water! By making it easy to join in the fun, the Ice Bucket Challenge has become the viral sensation that we see online now. If the success of your campaign requires others to get involved, make sure that the barrier to them doing so is as small as possible!

In summary

Viral marketing campaigns can raise incredible awareness for your organization, but there is never a guarantee that a campaign will achieve any kind of success, much less the massive reach that we are seeing with the Ice Bucket Challenge. Being willing to take a chance on a potentially viral idea is great and I encourage you to explore those ideas, but you also need to make sure that your entire online strategy does not center on a viral campaign. A well-rounded strategy that may include a viral campaign as one of the pieces, but which also embraces other initiatives as well (search engine ads, email marketing, content marketing/blogging, etc.) is how you will want to proceed. That way, if the viral campaign explodes, then you have the exposure you wanted, but if it fizzles, at least you have other initiatives working towards your online success.

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The Next Big Thing in Website Design: Wearable Technology

5 years ago, if you would’ve told me that people would be using mobile phones with tiny screens to access website content, I would’ve said that you were crazy. Obviously, I would have been quite wrong.

Today, I have clients who see more than 50% of their traffic come from mobile devices. The rise of those devices has changed the web design industry more so than any other thing I have seen in my 15+ years of designing and developing websites. Today, I see some of the signs I saw at the start of that rise in the growing popularity of wearable devices.

In this article, we will talk about what these wearable devices are, how they are used, and how their adoption may affect your business and your website.

What are wearable devices?

As the name suggests, “wearable devices” are ones that consumers actually wear on their body, as opposed to ones that they simply carry with them like a smartphone. Popular wearable device examples would be smartglasses, like Google Glass, and smartwatches, like the Moto 360 from Motorola or the forthcoming Apple Watch.

Each of these devices allow users to connect to the Web and access online content, and all of these devices feature screen sizes that are much smaller than what you will find on current smartphones. If you thought that it was a challenge to get your website content to be effective for a mobile phone, think about that same task now applied to an even smaller form factor!

It is that smaller form factor that is often given as a way to dismiss wearable devices ever being used to visit websites. Many people question whether a person would even want to access web content on those small screens. This is the same argument that was made early on in the rise of mobile devices like smartphones. The problem with this thinking is that it assumes that the wearable device is being used on its own, when in reality, the strength of these devices is how they connect as part of a larger ecosystem.

A connected ecosystem

Recently, we have been testing and experimenting with some wearable devices in our offices, including the aforementioned Moto 360 smartwatch and Google Glass. While these devices are amazing and powerful in their own right, they really begin to shine when they are paired with other devices, like a smartphone.

Yes, the tiny screen of a smartwatch makes reading long blocks of content or doing data entry on a webform uncomfortable, but those tasks can easily be bumped over to a connected smartphone. The watch can be used to filter this information. Instead of digging into my pocket to get my phone to check my emails or view online updates, I can more easily scan that information on the watch. Then, once I have identified something that requires my attention, I can switch to the phone, a tablet, or even a laptop of desktop computer to complete that task. In this way, I am using each device for what it does best – and both of them are accessing web-based content.

By connecting devices, you can also create actions or “triggers” based on certain parameters. For instance, in our testing we were able to take a picture with Google Glass and automatically publish that image to our Twitter account. Pretty cool, but we wanted to really take it a step further and see how far we could push this concept of connected devices and automatic actions. To do this, we purchased a MindWave headset from Amazon.com. This device measures brainwave activity. By using Bluetooth to connect that scanner to Google Glass and a smartphone, and with a little additional programming, we were able to create triggers that activated when certain thresholds were met. The first of those triggers caused Google Glass to snap a photo. The next trigger posted that photo to Twitter. These “triggers” were activated when the brainwave scanner sensed a change in a person’s brainwave patterns. We were able to demonstrate the process of automatically taking a photo and uploading it to social media – all with no input required other than changing the way we think.

Admittedly, this demonstration was a bit over-the-top by design. I do not expect consumers to start running around with brainwave scanners anytime soon, but the lesson here is that these devices, when connected as part of a larger ecosystem, can become so much more than the sum of their parts. As website owners, we really need to stop thinking about devices on an individual basis and start considering them as part of a larger whole.

Embracing the concept of "one Web"

When smartphones began to really gain popularity, companies realized that they could no longer ignore mobile by simply allowing their “normal” site (which was created to be used on a desktop computer, not a smaller handheld mobile device) to be sent to those phone screens. The solution that many companies embraced during this time was to create a separate “mobile-only” site for visitors using a smartphone. This solution became strained as tablet devices entered the market next.

Technically considered a mobile device, but with a screen size closer to a laptop than a phone, tablets really forced companies to question this “separate sites” approach. Yes, you could create one site for large, desktop monitors and another for mobile phones, but would you now create one for tablets –

leaving you with 3 sites to manage and maintain? With the rise of wearable devices, will you need to create a new site for each distinct wearable category? That is a long and expensive road to travel.

The desire to have only one website to manage and maintain has led to the adoption of responsive web design as an industry best practice. Responsive web design allows you to have one website that will automatically change its layout based on the user’s screen size. This was helpful when we had to consider mobile phones and tablets. With the rise of new wearable devices, this concept of “one web” is even more important.

If you intend to develop separate sites for each possible screen size, you will always be playing catch-up. As new devices enter the market, you will need to create a new site for each device type, which means you need to endure the time and expense of constantly rolling out new sites. This can quickly becoming overwhelming.

The reality is that there is no “mobile web”, there is just one Web and as the emergence of wearable devices has shown, our customers are using a variety of devices to access that Web and the content we put out there.

To do now

As wearable devices go from a novelty being used by the few to a way of life for the many, we want to make sure our sites will be ready. Don’t think wearable devices will ever be popular with consumers or used to regularly access web content? Again, that is exactly the argument that was given when smartphones first began gaining popularity, and we can see how that turned out. No, the question of wearable devices is not “if” they will impact our websites and audience, it is “when” they will do so.

If you have not already embraced the “one web” approach on your website, now is the time to really start exploring that option. You can begin by testing your website out on a variety of devices. If you have the ability to purchase these devices at your business, that is great, but even if you do not have the budget for devices purchases, you can still test your site on them. Visit your local Best Buy or other electronics retailer and see what new wearable and mobile devices are available today. Access your website on those devices to get a feel for what your customers may be seeing if they are visiting your site with similar devices.

You can also speak to your web or marketing agency about the rise of wearable devices and how to best prepare your site for them. By being proactive about wearable device support on your website, you can be a leader in the rise of these new devices, instead of a company trying to play catch-up after the fact.

 

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