After barely managing to ingest some crummy boxed lunches, we found ourselves at yet another presentation at SES Chicago called “Igniting Viral Campaigns.” There were several speakers on the panel.

Bill Hanekamp (The Well) started things off for us. He didn’t claim to have a “search engine marketing” background, so he doesn’t really speak tech jargon. He also claimed that he used to market a lot of ‘vice’ goods such as cigarettes and alcohol:

• After optimizing your site for the search engines; make people care about visiting your site and recommend it to other people
• On websites, there’s content you make, and content your visitors make. Both are important.
• Four things important for ‘buzz marketing’: entertaining, relevant, timely, and exclusive - these make something ‘buzz worthy’
• Allow visitors to participate in the website itself and create great content FOR YOU; get them to upload stuff, comment, etc.
• You must target people very specifically; what is your objective with marketing? Generate awareness? Leads? You will need a different course depending on what you want out of your campaign.

Edward Kim (Red Bricks Media) spent a bit of time trying to get a YouTube video to run, and then tried getting it to open directly from a Quicktime file. Finally, we got to check out a viral video clip of Eric Jackson trying to supplant the corporate board of Yahoo. Someone who had 45 shares of Yahoo managed to convince a large number of shareholders to make change in the company. Here were the main points he made about viral marketing:

• People rely most on recommendations from others to make their purchase decisions because they trust that form of advertising the most.
• People also highly trust consumer opinions posted online.
• Targeting ‘influencers’ can really help with getting the word out… find a way to connect with them.
• Who are the peripheral people who can offer value to the site and marketing efforts? How do you reach out to them in a creative way? Answering these questions will bring you one step closer to figuring out what form of viral marketing to employ.

Fionn Downhill (Elixer Systems) pitched in on how to create sites that generate ‘buzz’ by saying:

• Recommendations by consumers is the best form of advertising.
• Free viral techniques: Utilizing RSS feeds, writing helpful articles, adding links to social bookmarking sites, add actionable items to your pages (for example: email opt-ins), and finding social ‘influencers’ and reaching out to them.
• The ‘whole deal’ is return on investment. Don’t waste your time targeting anyone who’s outside of your niche.

What we think is immediately applicable to real estate marketing:

These viral forms of advertising don’t cost ANYTHING for the most part, so you need to go out and utilize blogs, social networking sites, ‘answers’ sites, etc. because they can send you a lot of highly targeted traffic.

You can easily utilize your expertise in the real estate field and parlay that into a series of expert articles, podcasts, even video tours of homes, or ebooks on buying real estate in your area.

You can demonstrate your personality through viral marketing, so if you have a hobby you’re passionate about, or just have a great sense of humor, don’t be afraid to tap into those aspects of yourself in the marketing you do! The best viral campaigns often use humor as the main thing that draws people’s attention. And people who share your favorite hobbies will appreciate that, and will definitely be more interested in working with you as a result of that.

How can you “roll out the red carpet” for people of influence in your area? What would it take to get a glowing testimonial from them? If you have influential clients, see if there’s some way you can involve them in your marketing campaigns. Also use those people you work with (mortgage companies and lawyers)

What forms of media are people using in your area? If no one in your town knows what a blog even is, but your friends all use YouTube, it would be better to prioritize putting some well-thought out amateur videos together, posting them, and then spreading them around than to invest in a professional blog and recurring copywriting service.