Save Money—Maybe the World, Too—with Viral Marketing

The next time you need to promote a conference, just remember two words: viral marketing.

Our conference, the Behavior, Energy and Climate Change (BECC) conference, got astonishing results with viral marketing—essentially a word-of-mouth campaign that uses existing social networks—for (get this) practically no money.

The BECC conference in November was convened by California Institute for Energy and Environment at the University of California, Precourt Institute for Energy Efficiency at Stanford University, and the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy.

It was the first national conference on accelerating the transition to an energy-efficient, low-carbon economy by applying knowledge about behavior and decision-making. We wanted to understand how people’s everyday decisions can help bring climate change under control.

It was a neat topic, but pretty technical. We thought we’d attract about 150 participants.

Announcements went out on several “opt-in” e-mail lists (people signed up—nobody bought their names). The recipients all cared about climate change, and knew something about it, so they were prime targets. Many of them turned around and promoted the conference on their own organizations’ Web sites. Or they forwarded our announcement to their colleagues. Or they mentioned it in a blog.

A professor in the U.S. sent our announcement to some international colleagues. One colleague then announced the conference in a newsletter that reached more than 1,000 readers.

The results? With no print marketing or mailing, the conference sold out a month in advance, with over 500 participants—more than three times what we expected.

We got people from Africa, South America, Europe, New Zealand, and even Mongolia, among other places. Very big names called us to ask if they could make presentations.

We were ecstatic.

What made viral marketing successful for us—as it will be for you—is to find (or be found by) lists of self-selected individuals who are genuinely interested in your topic. Of course, you have no control once your message is out on the Internet, so it’s not the way to do marketing that you want tightly targeted. But for us, it was a great way to get the word out to people who were interested but we wouldn’t have found any other way.

Far more important, you can supercharge your cause using the tremendous power of online communities. It’s what we always hoped to do with the Internet, and now we can.

Linda Schuck is Senior Advisor at the California Institute for Energy and Environment.

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