Infectious Communication

Grant Leboff: Shaun, in your book, one of the things you talk about is this phrase, “infectious communication,” which I think perhaps a lot of people haven’t heard before. Could you just explain what “infectious communication” is?

Shaun Smith: “Infectious communication” is when customers do your marketing for you. If we think of traditional, above-the-line marketing, TV advertisements, print, and all of these things, I think increasingly, it’s becoming below the radar for customers, because they just screen it out. When was the last time you willingly watched an advertisement on a TV break, for example, a commercial break? You just scroll past it, don’t you?

Even when you do see an advertisement, I think consumers often take it with a very large pinch of salt, because they know, it’s marketing. Infectious communication is when customers are sharing information about you willingly, which goes viral. If you think about going on holiday … We used to watch, or look at the brochures that were published by the big travel companies. Now, we go on to “Trip Advisor,” and we’ll read what other people have said about that destination, or whatever …

Infectious communication is really when you create the means to help your customers share their stories. A great example of this is, if you take “The Lego Movie.” “The Lego Movie” made $500 million for Lego … $500 million for a 98-minute advertisement. It was a very funny film, but essentially, it’s a 98-minute advertisement, that people paid to watch. Twenty-seven million people watched the trailer on YouTube … Twenty-seven million people wanting to watch an advertisement about your product. That’s what I mean by infectious communication.

Grant Leboff: How does a company go about even thinking about creating something that will be … Everybody wants … That would be their golden thing, making something that’s infectious. How does a company go down that road of making it happen?

Shaun Smith: Well, you’ve got to be intentional about it, and … There are two things which are really crucial in infectious communication – Timing and Tone. You’ve got to get the Timing absolutely right, and you’ve got to get the Tone spot-on, and if you do those two things, it really spreads.

A great example of that was, at the 2013 Super Bowl competition in the States, which is the most watched event of the year in the United States, where organizations compete to have huge budgets on advertisements during the breaks in the play. Oreo Cookies, which is a biscuit manufacturer in the States, had a team of fifteen people at the event, just looking at social media, and during the 2013 Super Bowl, the power went out! All of the lights went out!

Within seconds, Oreo had tweeted this: “You can still dunk in the dark.” And it went viral; hundreds of thousands of people saw it. In fact, it was the most viewed message of the Super Bowl, and it was just a simple tweet. So, it’s Timing, and Tone, but you’ve got to be intentional about it, and you’ve got to be really clear about the kind of audience you’re trying to attract, or reach; the kind of message that’s likely to appeal to them; and it’s got to be on-brand.

Grant Leboff: What happens when companies don’t get it right? What happens when companies attempt something, and it goes wrong?

Shaun Smith: Yeah, the problem is that, often, when organizations try and manipulate something, or they try and create something, is when it goes wrong, because consumers are pretty clever. They know what you’re looking for, and of course, they could be very perverse, and they’ll just do the opposite.

A story in point, or case in point, was Durex, the condom manufacturer. They launched a new line of condoms, called “S.O.S. condoms” and they went out into social media, and said, “Which cities do you think we should distribute S.O.S. condoms to first? It’s a competition, and there’s a prize, but we’d like to know your views on which cities should get S.O.S. condoms first?” They were thinking, perhaps, it would be the more romantic cities … Paris, or Rome, perhaps …

In fact, consumers kind of ganged up on them, and nominated a place that none of us have ever heard of, called “Batman,” which is an extremely Muslim place in Turkey, a very, very orthodox place in Turkey, and of course, the genie was out of the bag … You can’t put it back in the bottle, once something like that is out there, and they had to deal with the after-effects of that.

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