If you think project management is a case of the blind leading the blind, try your hand at marketing some time.

Niche content designed to go viral can literally apply to people in a geographic region of a single neighbourhood.

And the neighbourhood can be both literally, as in a few blocks of houses, and figurative, as in a small hobby interest about bare back riding on the slopes of Machu Pichu.

The distance between “unable to” and “can” is getting narrower. I was unable to reach a wide enough audience with my ideas. But now I can. I was unable to build my own furniture. But now I can. I was unable to design my own shoes. But now I can. Now, we all can. On the flip side, the distance between can and will is getting wider. I can print my own t-shirts. But I don’t have the time. I can design my own jewelry. But there’s so many other things to do. I can build my own publishing channel. But this other company did it for me. The problem with “will” is that we defer the action of doing until later, because we use the paradox of choice to make no choice at all.

Persuasion and context is inherently tied up in who you are.

If Woody Allen remarks that he’s going to make someone an offer, it has a quite different meaning than if the same thing is said by Don Corleone, even if the syntax is identical.

If Don Corleone says that he is going to make a funny movie, we would all laugh before the movie was made. If Woody Allen said the same thing, nobody would be laughing.

Trust builds in those brands, products, services and vendors that we interact with regularly.

The problem for most brands, products, services and vendors is that unless a large amount of real-world money is being spent on direct advertising and marketing, it can be difficult (but not impossible) to build repeated interactions with the target audience.

But there is another technique, that takes some time, and costs almost nothing at all, that helps to build trust through repeated interaction.

Psst… You’re reading it.

I don’t care how flashy your website is, if you’re a small business, you better have a rock solid foundation to your business otherwise you’re just throwing money at a solution that cannot possibly help you.

Congratulations, your marketing gizmo just went viral.

Likes, shares and follows are pouring in.

Why?

Did you ask “why do we need to go viral?” before you went viral?

Hopefully you did.

Because if you didn’t, you are probably capturing all that social media goodwill by accident rather than intentionally.

Identify the “why I want to go viral” and how you will translate that traffic in to real-world benefits for your product or service.

And then figure out how to go viral.

Without the “why” (which most people overlook) you’re just wasting all that attention people are giving you.

Authentic efforts to connect, either with an homogenous and disparate audience, or with individual influencers, are always going to be more powerful than an orchestrated public relations message or approved marketing channel.

Anything that is decided by a group or committee, that is then filtered through whatever corporate translation service that churns out dry and mundane messages is good for only one thing, generating “news” for news channels that only want to fill column inches of digital ink.

Measuring your success of a campaign to connect by digital ink column inches is a sure way to fail, but to fail whilst you feel good about yourself.

Let’s go viral.

How hard can it be?

Right?

You can go viral, but like all marketing, it’s not a one-shot thing and you are done.

Just like creating a product or service, a viral marketing item needs to have a narrowly defined target audience.

And your viral marketing item *MUST* market at your target audience – you need to market your marketing item.

Bad marketing is like yesterday’s news.

Once you’ve heard something, it’s no longer news.

If you cannot find a reason to market, you probably don’t have anything worth selling.

Being purposeful will give you a brand.

Being genuine will build your brand.

Being consistent will build your brand online.

Hopefully you aren’t the sort of person that shows up to a family member’s wake and immediately starts extorting the value of timeshare apartments.

If you are, get a clue.

But if you aren’t, you realize there is an appropriate time and an appropriate place to market your product or service.

Appropriateness is dependent on your scale, but it is also dependent on your audience wanting to hear your message.

Appropriateness frames not only when we deliver our message but also the message that we deliver.

Just because you have a communications channel that can be used for marketing, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it should be used for marketing, or marketing at this time.

You can find an appropriate time to sell your grieving aunt on a timeshare opportunity so that she has a place to get away and recover from her grief.

Doing it in front of the open casket is probably not the place though.

There are two types of website you should consider for your business.

Informational, in which case, keep it simple and clean.

Or functional, which means your website is not just an advertisement for your business, but an extension of it.

You should rarely need both.

The more niche you can make your viral content, the more likely it is to go viral.

Narrowly defined niche audiences will share with other connections in their network of narrowly defined niche audience.

That’s what it means to go viral.

Viral doesn’t mean “go big” it means “go big within a niche.”

Once you go viral within the niche, then you have the possibility to go viral within the general population.

When I talk about my emigration to America I mention that the first thing I did was learn the language.

Which always raises a chuckle.

But when I am marketing to an audience, when I am trying to close a sale, when I want someone to inherently believe in my words, the last thing I want is for my audience to be distracted by an unfamiliar idiom (“as useless as tits on a boar hog” not “taking coal to Cardiff (or Newcastle)”), an odd pronunciation (“‘erb” not “herb”) or a curious spelling (“color” not “colour”).

Language is a tool.

An odd pronunciation or curious turn of phrase can be as powerful as dropping the word “Fuck” in to the middle of a sentence.

Learn to use your tools effectively.

Do you want to be heard?

Or do you want to be listened too and understood?

Advertising consists solely of being heard. To be heard, you have to shout. Loudly. And often.

Marketing should be created so that it can be listened to, thought about, and understood.

Where everything goes off the rails is when you’re no longer being listened to, and then you will do anything you can to just be heard.

It is better to have your work pirated than to be ignored as an artist.

In the same vein, it is better to have people viewing your website but blocking your ads, than it is to not be viewed at all.

Implementing ad blocking detection, and preventing someone from viewing your content doesn’t make them disable their ad blocking software. It just drives their eyeballs to easier to consume content somewhere else.

P.S. I have statistics and analytics and data to back up my argument on both of your opinionated objections.

P.P.S. Copyright infringement is still copyright infringement and no, you aren’t “doing the artist a favour by getting them more exposure” by distributing their work illegally.

Do you want to be listened to?

Or do you just want to be heard?

A neat direct marketing hack I’ve frequently deployed on all new products when I want to gain instant traction is to offer a VIP service to potential customers.

The VIP service can come in the form of more features they would have to pay for at the next tier up.

Or faster, better service in the form of more responsive to feature requests, support requests or other value-adds.

All for the simple obligation of a referral or a testimonial.