Ryan MacMillan

Bad Virgin Food

Recently there has been a lot of commentary about a scathing (and hilarious) letter of complaint written by a disgruntled Virgin passenger. I had it sent to me as a PDF in an email on January 23rd and it finally hit the mainstream media on Feb 16th. It’s as good an illustration as any that viral is an adjective, not noun; a piece of content can be distributed in a way that imitates the exponential occurrence of a virus. In other words, it behaves virally - but it’s not actually something that’s called a ‘viral’. So when Brand Republic writes that “Zara Phillips and a horse star in a Land Rover viral that breaks today” it seems to me they’re jumping the gun a bit. It’s more correctly a video that it is hoped will become viral in its distribution behavior.

It’s an important distinction, as the constant association of viral distribution with funny edgy, gripping or sexy video content means that marketers are potentially missing opportunities: if what you have to distribute is valued by them, your audience they will do it on your behalf; in other words, pass it on to interested friends who will do the same, much like a like a cold goes round the office in January.

The other letter I came across recently that displayed the attributes of viral distribution was from Canon. Like the Virgin letter it wasn’t distributed at the brand’s behest, but unlike the Virgin example it was distributed because it was useful, not because it was an hilarious piss-take.

Canon users had been discussing an issue they had with the EOS 5D. Canon had responded by issuing a customer service letter to owners of the product. The product owners found the information so useful that they re-posted it in camera forums, Flickr groups and on product review sites. 2,300 times.

Be KUDOS with your social media and your audience will distribute your content for you - in whatever format they find the most useful.

This morning I’ve been doing some research in to Barack Obama’s use of social media both in the primaries and the election-proper and was about to Twitter my iritation that every single blogger ever (and this is in no way an exaggeration) has blogged on Obama’s use of social media. I decided not to rant at the Twitter-verse, however, and instead decided to carry myself with a little more decorum.

Decorum, however, was thrown out of the windown when, to my surprise, I googled ‘Obama social media’ and saw this:

…yep, thats right; if you google ‘Obama social media’ through all of the noise, all of the manifold articles that have been blogged about Obama, Dan’s post ranks at number 5 on Google. Hurrah (…for Dan).

I suppose then its a good job that R*M will be presenting some of its thoughts on Obama’s success at Digital Lounge’s ‘Obama 2.0: Lessons in Social Media from the Obama Presidential campaign’ in the new year.

As a part of their annual survey of the interactive agency landscape, The NMA Top 100, the lovely people at New Media Age have decided that Ryan*MacMillan are ‘ones-to watch’. We’re in good company with our neighbors and friends at Infectious Media,  and that old media star Trevor Beattie. The fulsome praise can be read here.

Our latest article for Contagious magazine has seen us dip our KUDOS toes into the world of publishing.

The Other Side, a new, free monthly magazine aimed at London’s Northern Line underground commuters, has built an accompanying online community on social network, Webjam. Our Contagious article uses the KUDOS planning framework to see how the activity is measuring up so far.

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Keeping up with the article Ben wrote for the Contagious newsletter two weeks ago, I’ve run innocent smoothie’s “Buy One Grow One” campaign through KUDOS and given it the scorecard below. Consumers can purchase a specially-marked carton of an innocent smoothie and enter the unique code onto the campaign web site — for each code entered, innocent will plant a tree in rural Africa or India on the consumer’s behalf. Participants can keep track of their trees online, and share their progress with widgets and badges.
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