Swine Flu, Tamiflu Viral MarketingCategory: All news, panic, scare, seo, swine flu, tamiflu, uk, usa | |
29 04 2009 |
Protect yourself from the swine flu scare, wear a mask!
Do you consider dying of swine flu in the next few days? We have the perfect swine flu resource for you, concise and insightful. As this here is a marketing publication, a so called “SEO blog” we will also cover the “viral marketing” aspect of this flu scare.
- Is swine flu really dangerous?
To be honest I managed to ignore the news of swine flu for a few days. Now I got a cold myself so I thought why not just go with the flow and write about this latest hype. I mean:
Swine flu is bigger than Twitter, it’s even bigger than Google, it’s scarier than terrorism and the world economic crisis combined. Hell, it may be even bigger and scarier than bird flu!
Remember the bird flu? Remember the millions of people who died of it? Well no, just a few people died all over the world taken together. On the other hand an anti-viral drug called Tamiflu, previously a huge failure at the pharma market, has seen a tremendous soar in demand.
Viral marketing is usually a metaphor describing the spread of a meme (piece of information) like a virus. It’s self replicating and spreading very quickly. I will show how viral marketing for Tamiflu converges with the real or rather hyperreal swine flu virus.
First I will focus on the facts about swine flu though: I just read a dozen or more articles about it and do not know much more than before reading all of them. So I picked a few resources for those of you who are about to hit the panic button.
- First off we have 36 thousands! flu deaths in the US annually, already 13k this year. So this pandemic is kind of second rate as of now with just a few dozens of swine flu cases in the US and only one US citizen (a toddler) killed in a over a week and 5 confirmed cases in the UK. Don’t get me wrong every human life lost is tragic but clearly this is no world wide emergency or pandemic at all yet. Usually kids, the chronically ill and elderly die of flu. So this recent flu death seems to be in accordance with the norm.
- In case you think the swine flu is something new you err: Already in 1976 we had a major national swine flu scare in the US but in the end only one person died of the flu virus while hundreds died due to vaccine side effects.
- Today the swine flu seems not as dangerous as expected as well. Recent 45 cases in a New York school have been ignored by the authorities for long enough to kill off half of NYC but nothing like that happened. Not even one of the students died.
- We live in hyperreal times as some philosophers and sociologist use to call it. Things that get multiplied by the media seem to be much larger than thy are in reality. Larger than life so to say. Google News listed some 35k recent stories about swine flu. Swine flu is one of the most popular topics globally for a few days now. Another comparison: Here in Germany where I live we have ca 5k dead in car accidents each year. On the other hand we hand no terrorism related killings in almost 20 years. Nonetheless the threat f terrorism is omnipresent in all media daily and every years new state laws strip the last remainders of civil liberties we had to protect us from it. Guess what? How many media outlet report about the car accidents? Just those that write that we had less people killed than last year. Below 5k this time.
- There is big money in swine flu! You might brush off the Tamiflu example I give as one of the many “conspiracy theories”. On the other hand it’s far easier to demonstrate that there is big money in the swine flue business. The Obama administration already applied for a 1.5+ billion dollars swine flu budget, just days and a few cases of it being reported. This number may seem small in times of needy banks getting trillions but it might grow quickly. Who gets the money? Who earns money due to a swine flu scare? Big pharma. Who exactly though?
I remember when bird flu was all the rage a few years ago. I was really concerned back then. I collected all kinds of information about the cases and how it spread. As I am a SEO I thought about setting up a blog or microsite collecting the info. I even considered to become a Tamiflu affiliate to sell to my visitors. Well that was the evil part of me.
On the other hand I just wanted to inform, as I was astounded by the huge buzz the bird flu created and the lack of comprehensive and down to earth resources that don’t panic but assess the situation. I quickly noticed that most even slightly relevant domain names containing bird flu or even the virus abbreviation had been taken already. Searching in Google always brought some spammy black hat SEO sites capitalizing on the scare.
So apparently a flu scare is good for SEO!
Well, I wasn’t happy with the results so dived in deeper into that topic. Finally I discovered some dissident voices questioning the bird flu scare tactics. Moreover I found out that the anti-viral medicine hailed as the only solution to bird flu, Tamiflu has been developed by a company owned largely by Donald Rumsfeld. Yes, that’s the guy who sold us an illegal war in Iraq based on lies and Orwellian propaganda tactics.
Now imagine my “surprise” when I read an AP story about swine flu today which I already linked above. A sentence that might not seem important at first says: “Some students received doses of Tamiflu [my emphasis], the medication that can help alleviate symptoms of the flu.”
Rumsfeld might not be in power anymore but he surely is still, or back, in business after the bird flu scare subsided. As someone who can spot viral marketing from afar I tell you one thing: Imagine a situation where the virus is the marketing itself and you are the only one to sell the product needed to fend off the panic.
Make sure to come back to this blog on Friday to read my regular column called Twitter Friday. Next week I will also publish the second part of the huge non-Google SEO resources list so consider returning then too. In case the articles should not appear on SEOptimise I’m probably dead though as the swine flu could kill me by then. Please link this article and also my SEO blog then! I want my 15 minutes of fame!
You don’t need a real virus for viral marketing.
I’m not encouraging bioterrorsim or something. Language is a virus itself as a famous poet once stated. As we see in the case of swine flu though viral marketing is most successful when you create both: Supply and demand.
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Swine Flu, Tamiflu & Viral Marketing
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