You have heard it before – “We gotta get this to go viral!”

The first question a marketer should ask themselves, or their social media crazed comrade, is “who cares?” Not in a flippant, sarcastic way but in a very serious way. You don’t need to try to have the online community buzzing about your product, if they don’t have a reason to care. And frankly you will be wasting your time to try and build the hype for your product if you cannot determine its relevance to the your business goals.

Hype, or buzz, or viral online marketing is a useful tool, but there needs to be a compelling reason for people to pay attention and – most importantly – share. If you sell an athlete’s foot remedy and decide to run a highly controversial, viral campaign you may fall flat on your face. Hype and buzz boil down to your target audience. If only middle age, white, overweight, technically illiterate men buy your product then Twitter may not be the right way to get the word out; in three years it may, due to the rising adoption rate among older people. But not now. If you can’t answer the question as to who buys your product/services then you are in trouble, I would find out fast.

Simply put, hype is the end result of a well targeted, well executed campaign that generates enthusiasm from your audience to do the engage in a conversation. And remember visibility is good but if the people you’ve attracted aren’t the target profile of your customer then you’ve just wasted your time, and worse, money. You’ve only hyped for hype’s sake.