Confusion about viral media will not be easily resolved. The term is at once too encompassing and too limiting, creating false assumptions about how culture operates and distorted understandings of the power relations between producers and audiences. As we have been making this argument over the past few years while working on this project, we have found a growing number of marketers and media professionals also challenging the term. (See, for instance, Yakob 2008; Arauz 2008; Caddell 2009b; Askwith 2010; Hasson 2010; Chapman 2010.) The term even received the most nominations for elimination in Lake Superior State University’s annual “List of Banished Words from the Queen’s English for Mis-use, Over-use, and General Uselessness” (2010). Bluntly put, an antidote for the viral needs to be discovered; we hope this book contributes to that growing charge.
In contrast, the concept of “spreadability” preserves what was useful about earlier communication models—the idea that the effectiveness and impact of messages is increased and expanded by their movement from person to person and community to community. Spreadability recognizes the ways later theorists such as van der Graaf have revised the earliest, relatively static and passive conceptions of “viral” to reflect the realities of the new social web, while suggesting that this emerging paradigm is so substantively different from the initial examples that it requires adopting new terminology. Our use of “spreadable media” avoids the metaphors of “infection” and “contamination,” which overestimate the power of media companies and underestimate the agency of audiences. In this emerging model, audiences play an active role in “spreading” content rather than serving as passive carriers of viral media: their choices, investments, agendas, and actions determine what gets valued.
However, while this book combats the use of “viral” to describe many processes in which people are actively involved in circulating and shaping the meaning of content, we want to acknowledge that there still remain examples of “viral marketing.” Ilya Vedrashko (2010b) argues that, as marketers (hopefully) shift away from “viral marketing” as a catch-all term, they cannot forget that there are still literal examples of viral marketing which do not seek to engage audiences but rather deploy automated ways to induce audience members to unwittingly pass along their marketing messages.
As Iain Short (2010) points out, for instance, many applications for Twitter and Facebook send automated marketing updates to a person’s followers without a user actively passing this material along. Thus, downloading an app might cause a Facebook user’s friends to get pinged with a message encouraging them to join, or buying an animal on Farmville might send an update to all of a user’s Facebook friends (whether or not they play the game). In the instance of Facebook’s Open Graph feature, users receive notice that a friend is reading a particular story or watching a certain video in his or her Facebook news feed. In order to see the content, users have to download an application for that publisher, which then starts sharing what they read to their friends’ feeds. In all these cases, messages are sent “from the user,” without the user crafting the messages or often even being aware the message has been generated.
The use of “viral marketing” should be reserved only for those marketing concepts that really do not rely on the agency of audience members to circulate media texts for their own purposes and through their own relationships. Vedrashko writes,
The entire debate over the terminology might look to a marketing practitioner like an Ivory Tower nitpicking but it is an important one because metaphor-based terms rely on our understanding of the underlying concepts to guide our actions. An attempt to create a “viral” video will be informed by what one knows about viruses, which among marketing professionals isn’t a lot, anyway. On the other hand, a creator of a “spreadable” video will be drawing upon an entirely different body of knowledge, perhaps a theory about why people gossip, or the related theory of social capital. (2010b)
As Vedrashko suggests, the choice of metaphors sets expectations. If viral success means elements of a campaign have to be spread rapidly among audiences in pandemic proportions, then many companies are likely to be disappointed by the distribution they achieve. For instance, a 2007 JupiterResearch report found that only 15 percent of marketers launching viral campaigns were successful in “prompting their consumers to promote their messages for them.” By using the term “spreadable media,” we refer to (and draw on cases that describe) not just those texts which circulate broadly but also those that achieve particularly deep engagement within a niche community. In many cases, such content does not obtain the type of scale that would qualify for many people’s definition of “viral success,” yet the text became highly spread among the particular audiences the producer hoped to reach.
Further, if companies set out thinking they will make media texts that do something to audiences (infect them) rather than for audiences to do something with (spread it), they may delude themselves into thinking they control people. Conversely, understanding spreadability will allow audiences and activists to form new connections and communities through their active role in shaping the circulation of media content. The concept of spreadability also gives these groups new means to mobilize and respond to decisions made by companies and governments in ways that challenge decisions that adversely effect them and to exploit gaps in the system which may allow them to serve their own needs.
“Comcast Must Die”
Companies are not just worried about making their content “go viral,” though. Marketers have also been using the metaphor to make sense of how their customers’ communication about a company now has the potential to circulate widely.
Fifteen years ago, the degree to which audiences had direct access to brands, and vice versa, was limited. Direct mail may have targeted messages at particular customers. Brands with retail outlets had a direct customer touchpoint, but the brand ambassadors in this case—retail employees—were (and remain) among the least respected, trained, and compensated members of the organization. Some companies had sales forces that aggressively contacted potential customers but often only through a one-way message, as during the “telemarketing craze.” The most robust site of contact between customer and company was customer service, a division in most companies that has been marginalized and is often measured by efficiency—how quickly employees can get customers off the phone—rather than any prioritization of customer engagement (Yellin 2009). Thus, most correspondence between brand and company was one-way, providing little room for the customer to shape the experience.
These conditions persist. However, when corporate websites emerged by the mid-1990s, no one fully realized how substantially they would shift a company’s relationship with its audiences. Few of the companies creating brochure-like websites at the time completely considered that brands had the opportunity to tell their stories directly to the audience outside the constraints of advertising spots on television and radio and without going through the third-party voice of journalists. There would be a fundamental shift in how everyone “consumes,” as interested people could seek content from companies when they wanted it—to juxtapose and assess corporate messages directly from the source and to publish what they find online for family, friends, colleagues, and strangers to see.
Brands and entertainment properties cannot return to the one-directional communication flows of the broadcast era, when they had the perception of control, so companies must listen to and learn from their audiences if they want to enjoy long-term success.
This “lack of control” is particularly noticeable when it comes to customer complaints. In a world of spreadable media, what were once considered solely “customer service” issues are increasingly “public relations” issues as well (which is ironic, considering “customer service” was, in the early twentieth century, once called “public relations” [Yellin 2009, 22]), as customers spread their own stories about companies.
Comcast, the largest cable operator in the U.S.,