Mediaboss Marketing

Chances are, if you use any sort of social network, you'll have been on one end or the other of some viral marketing. You might have been asked to join an army, or build a town hall, or research a new cheesecake topping.

Maybe you're a perp, a peddler. Maybe you're one of the voluntary marketeers, flinging requests at your social compatriots at a rate of knots. Perhaps you're starting to wonder why nobody talks to you any more.

If you're on Facebook, then you're more likely than not to have hidden, blocked or even deleted a 'friend' because they just won't shut the hell up about their damned vegetables or their sheep. Enough, after all, is enough.

"Where there's that sort of opportunity there's bound to be someone who'll take advantage of it to the greatest extent that the market can bear"

But even if you're not a fan of having your social feeds flooded with requests, you've probably clicked a few here and there amongst the dismisals, perhaps discovered a game which you've ended up playing, enjoying or even monetising.

Two clicks and you never have to hear from a game again. So why does anybody listen at all?

Viral marketing is, to a large extent, becoming a victim of its own success. For a brief and golden period, viral marketing for social games was the philosopher's stone of advertising. It turned every user into a billboard, a radio beaming ad content into the eyelines of friends and family.

Exponential, effective and almost free.

As Alexis Kennedy, head of Failbetter Games and joint creator of interactive social story-telling game Fallen London (nee Echo Bazaar), points out, never before had there been such an incredible opportunity to expand an audience with such low expenditure.

"Somebody said a while ago that there has never been, in the history of the human race, an opportunity to acquire customers cheaply and quickly in the way there was in the early days of Facebook," Kennedy explains.

Continued here:
Social Inoculation: Why Failbetter Has Left Viral Marketing Behind