Matt Hockin spends his days thinking of new ways to infect you.
He's not trying to get you sneezing and coughing, and he doesn't want to ruin your computer with some errant bit of code. Rather, Hockin is fixing to get an e-mail to you that will so titillate you, make you so sick with pleasure, that you'll have no choice but to forward it on to your friends, who will in turn feel faint with the need to pass it along to others.
Hockin is what they call a "viral marketer."
Hockin and his colleagues at the firm Intrapromote have clients who aren't satisfied with the standard banner ad. So, like many companies on the Web today, they're turning to a new way of getting their name out: having people such as Hockin devise "viral objects" -- be they greeting cards or funny pictures, anything that people will want to send to their friends -- that subtly convey a company's brand message.
Take, for instance, Intrapromote's latest project, a viral marketing campaign for the Web services firm Verado.
Verado sells stuff that appeals to information technology (IT) types. Its products aren't easy to describe -- things such as "managed services" and "storage on demand" -- which makes it hard to promote in any mass-marketing sense. But Verado's products do make sense to people who keep networks running, Hockin said. And that group is pretty easy to infect.
IT people, Hockin said, are a homogenous group. By definition, these guys -- and almost all of them are male -- spend a lot of their time with their computers. Even their leisure time, Hockin thinks, is spent with their machines.
So since they like computers, since they even consider computers fun, why not send them something fun for their computers, the folks at Intrapromote asked. That is, why not create a video game?
"We thought," said Hockin, "'There's no game that's specifically for these people; let's make it a fun first-person, shoot-em-up game. These people are all techies; they like to do this stuff.'"
The firm created Verado: The IT Security Game, a two-dimensional, multi-level game that puts the player in the place of an "overworked, stressed IT guy," Hockin said.
Verado's logo is the first thing that comes up when you play the game, but that's about the most branding you get. After that, you're launched onto the first of several levels where your aim is to fend off attacks from hackers, spammers and various other evil computer-types.
In order to defeat the villains, the instructions say, you have to choose your weapon wisely: a shredder to defeat the spammer (which is weird, because you don't need to be an IT guy to know that shredding is not one of the ways to cut down spam), a shield to fend against viruses, etc.
The game is fun, Hockin says, but there's also a message. "The game says, you have to choose the right weapon against the attack." And no doubt the message goes deeper than that: When you need to fend off a real attack, the right weapon can be found at Verado.
It remains to be seen whether this game will become a hit. Intrapromote has just finished it and now they plan to promote it. How? "Well, if you guys write a story, that would be a great start," Hockin said.
"We also have people within our company who go to the IT forums and discussion groups. We do go in there and -- we don't spam or anything -- we just say 'Hey there's this game out, check it out.' We do it in a way that won't make anyone angry." That's how the viral ball gets rolling. Then there's the "tell a friend" button on each copy of the game: It takes you to a Verado page that lets you type in another person's name and e-mail address. That person is sent the game, and it's Intrapromote's hope that he or she will download it as well.
Hockin says that such campaigns take a little while to get off the ground, but that they are much cheaper for the customer and, he thinks, more effective than banner ads. That's because they can go on forever, as long as people think the game is fun and keep passing it along to other interested parties.
But Hockin cautions that it's not a "make-money-fast scheme," and that the campaign should be judged not in terms of how many more people start buying stuff from Verado, but by how many people start thinking about Verado. "We consider it a branding piece, an awareness piece. It's just to say, there's a company out here that does this stuff."
Dan Miller, the director of product management at the online marketing firm Digital Impact, agreed that such "viral" campaigns are a very good way to get a brand recognized.
Miller, who has done such campaigns for companies such as the gift-certificate company Flooz, said that "with effective (e-mail) campaigns, we've seen that cost per customer acquisition come down to 1/20 of the same cost for a banner campaign."
The Flooz Valentine's day campaign, for example, in which people were encouraged to send around a Flooz greeting card to their friends -- who were, in turn, encouraged to pass it along as well -- resulted in 110,000 "passes" over a 10-day period last year. A similar St. Patrick's day campaign had 95,000 passes over seven days.
"The great thing is it encourages customers to become advocates for the company," Miller said. "And you get this huge multiplier effect."
