While creating conversation and buzz is fantastic, all the publicity will not do advertisers any good if it doesn't relate back to their brands. For example, I was forwarded an interactive widget that I spent the better part of an hour using, but by the end of the day, I could not tell you what brand was behind it. This is ultimately a failure because, while the campaign got my attention and my time, there was no subsequent call-to-action or brand attached to benefit from the interaction.

Since the internet already has platforms established to both spread your campaign and gauge its effectiveness, marketers should start here when planning their campaigns. Blogs, social networking sites, video aggregators and microsites are ideal places to launch campaigns because they will be highly visible, searchable and distributable. When using social sites like Facebook and MySpace, a marketer can tap into pre-existing fan groups and use them to promote their campaign. In a similar manner, marketers can inform the blogging community about the promotion to get them involved in getting the word out. Since the main objective of a viral campaign is to encourage others to talk about your brand, ideally marketers need to get those who are already a part of the online conversation to be their evangelists.

If this is accomplished, a marketer just needs to monitor the buzz and not let the publicity go to waste. Using the buzz-giant Apple Computers as my hypothetical example, if Apple successfully creates noise around a scheduled product launch, it needs to follow through and provide a product worthy of the hype. Otherwise, future publicity could be centered around how the last launch was anticlimactic.