Viral Marketing

One of the side effects of faster Internet connections and more user interaction is viral marketing, a kind of marketing scheme that’s popular with large marketing firms and youth-oriented brands. Viral marketing tends to appeal to the youth market, but can branch out beyond that in some cases. Imagine that a high school student finds a web video that she thinks her friends would like. She sends this link to five friends. Those five friends send the link to five more friends, and so on. Pretty soon, thousands of people have seen this video in only a short amount of time. The link has spread almost like a virus, quickly and efficiently reaching a large group of people.

Viral marketing is, in essence, an electronic version of word of mouth advertising. This type of marketing uses existing social networks like email, Facebook, MySpace, newsgroups, message boards, and other communication systems to spread a specific message. Generally the idea is to increase awareness of a specific idea, brand, or product.

The term was coined to describe Hotmail. Before Microsoft bought Hotmail, the owners of this company decided that the best way to expand the message about their product was to let their users to this for them. Each Hotmail email sent out by a user contained a small ad at the bottom encouraging others to sign up for free Hotmail accounts. Since these messages were being sent by the thousands, this became a great advertising ploy to support the free email service. The message spread quickly, much like a virus. Now this is a commonplace practice among free email services.

Viral marketing can manifest itself in many different ways. First, viral marketing can be based on link or article sharing, where users simply forward email articles to their friends. Viral marketing can also be word-of-mouth, where the advertised company offers free products or services to some users who will hopefully spread that message to others. A viral marketing campaign can be a video posted on YouTube or a website that provides funny and interesting content with the intention of getting attention and getting people to talk to their friends. Some people may not want to mess with viral marketing, since success is volatile, and will choose instead to rely on proven methods of marketing like online advertising. Others might dabble and see if they have success.

Viral marketing is attractive because costs are low, and returns are high. The point is to create content or a message that people will want to pass along. An advertisement like the ads people see online everyday is not worth passing along. A funny or interesting web video, picture, or article, on the other hand, is worth passing along. The point of successful viral marketing is to create something that benefits the reader. When creating viral marketing campaigns, remember to keep the reader’s interests at heart.

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