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Viral Marketing. It sounds like something you would want to stay a long way away from. It's a term that found steam in the late 1990's and some say it was pioneered by Hotmail.com.
From Wikipedia:
"Viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness, through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses. It can be word-of-mouth delivered or enhanced by the network effects of the Internet. Viral marketing is a marketing phenomenon that facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message voluntarily. Viral promotions may take the form of funny video clips, interactive Flash games, advergames, images, or even text messages.
It is claimed that a satisfied customer tells an average of three people about a product or service he/she likes, and eleven people about a product or service which he/she did not like. Viral marketing is based on this natural human behaviour.
A goal of marketers interested in creating successful viral marketing programs is to identify individuals with high Social Networking Potential (SNP) and create Viral Messages that appeal to this segment of the population and have a high probability of being passed along.
The term "viral marketing" is also sometimes used pejoratively, to refer to stealth marketing campaigns--the use of varied kinds of astroturfing both online and offline to create the impression of spontaneous word of mouth enthusiasm."
The Hotmail Principle:
The classic example of viral marketing is Hotmail.com, one of the first free Web-based e-mail services. The strategy is simple:
- Give away free e-mail addresses and services,
- Attach a simple tag at the bottom of every free message sent out: "Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com" and,
- Then stand back while people e-mail to their own network of friends and associates,
- Who see the message,
- Sign up for their own free e-mail service, and then,
- Propel the message still wider to their own ever-increasing circles of friends and associates.
Like tiny waves spreading ever farther from a single pebble dropped into a pond, a carefully designed viral marketing strategy ripples outward extremely rapidly.
Hotmail grew a subscriber base more rapidly than any company in the history of the world ...faster than any new online, Internet, or print publication ever.
Hotmail is the largest email provider in the world.
In its first 1.5 years, Hotmail signed up over 12 million subscribers.
A traditional print publication would hope to reach a total of 100,000 subscribers within a few years of launch. Hotmail signs up more than 150,000 subscribers every day, seven days a week.
Every Hotmail subscriber, without exception, has filled out a detailed demographic and psychographic profile including occupation and salary. This is an unprecedented supply of personal information.
YouTube, MySpace, FaceBook and the like all have the element of Viral Marketing. It really is the current day equivalent of "Word Of Mouth" advertising.
Those funny jokes and wacky photo's that you receive via SMS to your mobile are also a form of Viral Marketing.
An example of how extensive and wide spread it can get is the following video. When I stumbled on it a few months ago it had a mere 3,000,000 (yeah, that's 3 MILLION) views. At last check it was just over 7,000,000. That's all in the time frame of 18 months. Wouldn't you like your product or service to be seen by that many people in such a brief time frame? Oh, and did I mention that this exposure was gained for FREE! Check it out. It's also funny.
Peter V
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