http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_marketing
Viral marketing
Viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that use preexisting social networks to produce increases in brand awareness, through self-replicating viralpathological and computer viruses. It can be word-of-mouth delivered or enhanced by the network effects of the Internet.[1] Viral marketing is a marketing phenomenon that facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message voluntarily.[2] Viral promotions may take the form of video clips, interactive Flashadvergames, images, or even text messages. processes, analogous to the spread of games,
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.[3] Viral marketing is based on this natural human behaviour.
The 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[4]--the use of varied kinds of astroturfing both online and offline [5] to create the impression of spontaneous word of mouth enthusiasm. campaigns
History
The term Viral Marketing was coined by a Harvard Business School professor, Jeffrey F. Rayport, in a December 1996 article for Fast Company The Virus of Marketing. [6] The term was further popularized by Tim Draper and Steve Jurvetson of the venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson in 1997 to describe Hotmail's e-mail practice of appending advertising for itself in outgoing mail from their users.[7]
Among the first to write about viral marketing on the Internet was media critic Douglas Rushkoff in his 1994 book Media Virus. The assumption is that if such an advertisement reaches a "susceptible" user, that user will become "infected" (i.e., sign up for an account) and can then go on to infect other susceptible users. As long as each infected user sends mail to more than one susceptible user on average (i.e., the basic reproductive rate is greater than one), standard in epidemiology imply that the number of infected users will grow according to a logistic curve, whose initial segment appears exponential.
Among the first to write about algorithms designed to identify people with high Social Networking Potential is Bob Gerstley in Advertising Research is Changing. Gerstley uses SNP algorithms in quantitative marketing research to help marketers maximize the effectiveness of viral marketing campaigns.
Notable examples of viral marketing
- BusinessWeek (2001) described web-based campaigns for Hotmail (1996) and The Blair Witch Project (1999) as striking examples of viral marketing, but warned of some dangers for imitation marketers. [8]
- Burger King's The Subservient Chicken campaign was cited in Wired as a striking example of viral or word-of-mouth marketing. [9]
- In 2000, Slate described TiVo's unpublicized gambit of giving free TiVo's to web-savvy enthusiasts to create "viral" word of mouth, pointing out that a viral campaign differs from a publicity stunt. [10]
- Cadbury's Dairy Milk 2007 Gorilla advert was heavily popularised on YouTube and Facebook.
- With the emergence of Web 2.0, mostly all web startups like facebook.com, youtube.com, collabotrade.com, myspace.com, and digg.com have made good use of Viral Marketing by merging it with the social networking.
- The release of the 2007 album Year Zero by Nine Inch Nails involved a viral marketing campaign, including the band leaving USB drives at concerts during NIN's 2007 European Tour. This was followed up with a series of interlinked websites revealing clues and information about the dystopian future in which the album is set.
- The upcoming film Cloverfield initially released one teaser trailer that did not reveal the title--only the release date. The subsequent online viral marketing campaign for the film is remarkably complex, making use of everything from fictitious company websites to MySpace profiles for the film's main characters.
- In 2007, World Wrestling Entertainment promoted the return of Chris Jericho with a viral marketing campaign using 15-second cryptic binary code videos. The videos contained hidden messages and biblical links hinting Jericho's return and were shown interrupting WWE broadcasts.[11]
I'm not a marketing guy. I'm a "technologist" (at least, this is how Hillel Cooperman kindly referred to me), but, I was just reading a blog post on Read/WriteWeb from Emre Sokullu "teaching" entrepreneurs on how to market their product and saw this:
"...You want to reach thousands of users as quickly as possible. Aha, you think, the cheapest and shortest path is viral marketing - via blogs and social news sites. ..."
And just to be clear -- again -- I'm not a marketing expert, but I had to learn a lot (I mean, *a lot*) about marketng to make sure I didn't ruin Sampa. And from the phrase above I can guarantee you that Emre Sokullu is not a marketing guy either. Heck, he knows even less than I know.
What he describe as "viral marketing" is not viral at all. That is PR -- good and old traditional press release work. This is also not new. Decades ago, having a big hit on a mainstream publication would be the equivalent of TechCrunch for a Web 2.0 company today. If you've got mentioned on Newsweek, NYT or CNN you could see your product fly out of the shelves, or your phones non-stop ringing. And that still happens today, independent of the Internet.
That begs the question: What is viral marketing?
Maybe I don't have the best definition, and I'm sure if I go to Wikipedia I'll find a great explanation (or a bad one, it depends on who edited it), but my definition goes like this:
Viral Marketing is when the customer is doing the marketing for a company.
What do you prefer to have, one excellent VP of Marketing, or 10,000 extremely satisfied customers that can't stop talking about your product and referring new customers?
Now, every company will have a viral multiplier. That multiplier is a rate of the existing user base. Some companies will have a very low multiplier. Maybe each 50 existing customers will bring 1 new customer. Some companies will have a very high multipler, as in each customer will bring 6 new customers.
Since we did a lot of work on the last 3 months at measuring, understanding and tweaking our viral rate, I could go on and on of how you do those things, but that is a very long blog post for now.
My recommendation is to not trust a technical guy with tips on how to do marketing. Get a marketing guy (or gal).
http://searchcrm.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid11_gci213514,00.html
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- On the Internet, viral marketing is any marketing technique that induces Web sites or users to pass on a marketing message to other sites or users, creating a potentially exponential growth in the message's visibility and effect. One example of successful viral marketing is Hotmail, a company, now owned by Microsoft, that promotes its service and its own advertisers' messages in every user's e-mail notes. Some marketing people prefer terms other than viral marketing. In his popular e-mail newsletter about selling on the Web, John Audette asked readers to suggest alternatives, including other terms in current use. Among those suggested have been:
avalanche marketing
buzz marketing
cascading style marketing
centrifugal marketing
exponential marketing
fission marketing
grass roots marketing
organic marketing
propogation marketing
referral marketing (borrowing a term long used in marketing prior to the Web)
ripple marketing
self-perpetuation marketing
self-propogation marketing
wildfire marketing
One reader suggested word of mouse.
http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/173398
1. any advertising that propagates itself. When Hotmail users send e-mail, they unwittingly infect the recipient with the tagline at the bottom of the message.
2. Viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that seek to exploit pre-existing social networks to produce exponential increases in brand awareness, through viral processes similar to the spread of an epidemic. It is word-of-mouth delivered and enhanced online; it harnesses the network effect of the Internet and can be very useful in reaching a large number of people rapidly.
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