When your product goes accidentally viral

What in the name of Billy Idol was that, you may ask? A version of Idol’s classic White Wedding remixed via Microsoft SongSmith into, well, a whole new kind of “classic.” The UK’s Telegraph explains it nicely, (for more posts, see techmeme) and lists a bunch of other “hits” on YouTube at the end of the article:

When the vocals of famous songs are run through the software, the backing tracks it adds are so unlikely that the end results often turn out as surreal reinventions of the originals.

Dozens of Songsmith reinterpretations have been posted on YouTube, including a hillbilly version of Billy Idol’s White Wedding, The Beatles classic Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band as if performed by a plodding hotel quartet, and a techno take on Wonderwall by Oasis.

This may not have been the kind of reaction the Microsoft team was hoping for, but it certainly is viral:

Many of the videos have been viewed more than a hundred thousand times.

The product itself hasn’t been received all that positively, (Crikey also) even with most of the early attention being focused on the rather strangely campy marketing video - which, in a head shaking move, features a MacBook Pro stickered-up to hide the Apple logo. And now an entire community has sprung up overnight on YouTube poking out some of the campy-sounding results of actually using the product.

So if you’re Microsoft, and you see Apple fans and others singing bad tunes with glee at your expense, with your product dropping into what I would describe as a negative viral cycle, what do you do?

1. You could go on the defense, write SongSmith off as a research project prematurely released into the wild, not intended to compete against Apple’s GarageBand, and supported with some less-than-ideal marketing. If you go this route, you might ignore the YouTube community growing up around your product, or try and de-emphasize SongSmith, change the conversation to other music products from the company, and so on. Or…

2. Or you could embrace it. Celebrate that yeah, it’s kind of a hokey product that produces some odd, but very funny results. Revel in the fact that people are actually out there, using SongSmith, playing with it, and talking about it online. It may not be the tone of conversation you hoped for, but that’s life on the Web. The world is laughing, so why not show that Microsoft can laugh right along with it? Embrace the “cult phenomenon” this has become, show off the best remixes on MSN or MS Research’s site, ask them to do a remix based on Ballmer’s (in)famous “Developers! Developers! Developers! rant), have the most remixer on YouTube do one to the Stones’ “Start Me Up”, work some into the next SteveB keynote, or maybe recut the marketing video to pay homage to how viral this has all become. The possibilities are as endless as the songs likely to be remixed on YouTube.

The point is, the spoofs are growing, the conversation is happening, the tone is being set with or without Microsoft’s involvement. A classic bit of “groundswell” if there ever was one.

Fortunately, it looks like Microsoft has decided to take it all in stride:

“…Spokesman Mike Houlihan says Songsmith is being “used in ways we haven’t quite imagined.”

“We’re happy to see so many people using Songsmith for creative expression,” he adds.

I’d love to see the company go further than bemused acknowledgement – this has inadvertently turned into a golden opportunity for Microsoft to tap into that rarest of beasts, a truly, accidentally, viral meme that’s focused on one of the company’s products. Have fun and run with it.

UPDATE: See the “Top 20 Songsmith Remixes” from the UK’s Times Online.