You know what I hate? “Viral Marketing.” Which isn’t to say that I hate quality content becoming viral. Instead, I hate the notion that viral marketing is something you can reliably plan.

Most people I meet who believe this fall into two categories:

1. People who are enamored by the amorphous power of the Internet but who don’t understand how the Internet ‘works’.

2. Lazy people who want to manipulate their customer base into becoming free advertising.

The Social Web is a potent marketing tool, but it’s not a ’set it and forget it’ strategy. As inexpensive as it is to market online from a monetary perspective, it’s going to cost you time. On top of that, the Web is unpredictable. No sane person could predict half of the stuff that hits the Digg frontpage ever getting there – today’s “Skydivers Are Pictured Playing Scrabble At 13,000ft” for instance.

When people ask me how to make something ‘go viral’ (another phrase I hate, by the way), I ask them what their strategy is, and it’s virtually always something like this:

Phase 1: Put Funny Video On YouTube

Phase 2: ???

Phase 3: Profit!

When it’s anything at all, that is.

Trying to make something blow up is a sure way to ensure that it doesn’t, if only because the number of people involved in managing the process dilutes the entertainment value and undermines any attempts to stay authentic. Sometimes, in fact, authenticity gets mucked up by a well-meaning person trying to make a viral tactic more authentic, which ends up leading to that creepy uncanny valley effect where your marketing efforts are going to look real but seem horribly fake.

Like this, a favorite dead horse of mine:

The other half of the viral myth – that everybody else is going to do the work for you – hinges on the idea that crowdsourcing is a real and viable force online.

It’s not.

Not strictly, anyway. Brian Clark wrote a pretty great post about social proof in social media earlier this week and it’s a very spot on analysis of the way communities function.

So, how do you go viral? The reality is that you probably won’t. We watch billions of hours of YouTube videos each year and we each read hundreds or thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of blog posts. It’s easy to publish online – and that’s great – but it’s tough to compete. Yes, your work is there for anybody to find, but there’s no push for anybody to go and find it. If you want to get noticed, you need to fight for it. Ask yourself if you’re promoting your content by:

1. Telling community influencers about it. Don’t send a form email/private message/what have you, either; make sure it’s personalized. The extra minutes it takes you will pay off in terms of relationship building.

2. Participating in the community where you want to become popular. This is the biggest no-brainer that marketers and e-commerce owners don’t do.

3. Driving traffic to your content through Facebook, Twitter and other outlets?

4. Not selling, but informing. Think about why people use social media and meet those needs. Provide value without acting like a pitch machine.

5. Not being overzealous. Telling a community emphatically that your new blog post is the best thing they’ve ever read is going to discourage clickthrough, reduce your trust in that community, and set the community trolls on you before you can say ‘ZOMG’.

Tell me what you think; how do you interact/react with online communities?