meme is a compelling one, it may not adequately account for how content circulates through participatory culture. While Dawkins stresses that memes (like genes) aren’t wholly independent agents, many accounts of memes and viral media describe media texts as “self-replicating.” This concept of “self-replicating” culture is oxymoronic, though, as culture is a human product and replicates through human agency.
Simplified versions of these discussions of “memes” and “media viruses” have given the media industries a false sense of security at a time when the old attention economy has been in flux. Such terms promise a pseudoscientific model of audience behavior. The way these terms are now used mystify the way material spreads, leading professional communicators on quixotic quests to create “viral content.”
The term “viral marketing” was first popularized in relation to Hotmail in 1995, after the creators of the service used the phrase to describe why their service gained millions of users within months (Jurvetson and Draper 1997). At the bottom of every email sent, a marketing message appeared which offered, “Get your free Web-based email at Hotmail.” The term described the process well. People communicated and—in the process—sent along a marketing message, often without realizing it had happened.
Yet the viral metaphor does little to describe situations in which people actively assess a media text, deciding who to share it with and how to pass it along. People make many active decisions when spreading media, whether simply passing content to their social network, making a word-of-mouth recommendation, or posting a mash-up video to YouTube. Meanwhile, active audiences have shown a remarkable ability to circulate advertising slogans and jingles against their originating companies or to hijack popular stories to express profoundly different interpretations from those of their authors.
“Viral marketing,” stretched well beyond its original meanings, has been expected to describe all these phenomena in the language of passive and involuntary transmission. Its precise meaning no longer clear, “viral media” gets invoked in discussions about buzz marketing and building brand recognition while also popping up in discussions about guerrilla marketing, exploiting social network sites, and mobilizing audiences and distributors.
Ironically, this rhetoric of passive audiences becoming infected by a media virus gained widespread traction at the same time as a shift toward greater acknowledgment that audience members are active participants in making meaning within networked media. Shenja van der Graaf maintains that viral marketing is “inherently social”: “the main feature of viral marketing is that it heavily depends on interconnected peers” (2005, 8); van der Graaf uses “viral” to describe content that circulates in ways linked to network behavior, citing participation within a socially networked system as a central requirement of “viral” behavior. This focus on how audiences pass material along, however, is distorted by the metaphor of infection that “viral” invokes.
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
