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Viral marketing

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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.

Viral marketing is sometimes used to describe some sorts of Internet-based stealth marketing campaigns, including the use of blogs, seemingly amateur web sites, and other forms of astroturfing to create word of mouth for a new product or service. Often the ultimate goal of viral marketing campaigns is to generate media coverage via "offbeat" stories worth many times more than the campaigning company's advertising budget.

The term "viral advertising" refers to the idea that people will pass on and share cool and entertaining content; this is often sponsored by a brand, which is looking to build awareness of a product or service. These viral commercials often take the form of funny video clips, or interactive Flash games, images, and even text.

Viral marketing is popular because of the ease of executing the marketing campaign, relative low-cost (compared to direct mail), good targeting, and the high and rapid response rate. The main strength of viral marketing is its ability to obtain a large number of interested people at a low cost. The main weakness is that sometimes messages can look like e-mail spam and this creates the risk of damaging the brand. The 'from' and 'subject' lines then become very important in order to remedy this problem (Tell-A-Friend principle); for example, when sending a link or webpage, sometimes the subject line is "(Name of person here) thought you would like this page". The receiver will then recognize the name and know that it is not unsolicited.

The most difficult task for any company is to acquire and retain a large customer base. Through the use of the internet and the effects of e-mail advertising, the business-to-consumer (B2C) efforts have a greater impact than many other tools of marketing. E-mail generates 15% of online sales in North America and is on the increase. Viral marketing is a technique that avoids the annoyance of spam mail; it encourages users of a specific product or service to tell a friend. This would be a positive word-of-mouth recommendation. One of the most successful perspectives found to achieve this customer base is the integrated marketing communication IMC perspective.

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History

The term viral marketing was originally coined by venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson in 1997 to describe Hotmail's email practice of appending advertising for themselves to outgoing mail from their users. 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 results in epidemiology imply that the number of infected users will grow according to a logistic curve, whose initial segment appears exponential.

If each user sends mail to more than one susceptible user then the campaign will in theory continue forever, or at least until all susceptible users have already received the message. Even if the message is not forwarded quite that often, the message might still be forwarded many more times than it was initially sent. For example, consider a campaign that starts out by mailing 100 users. Not all of them will forward the email, but some of them might. This 'some' would be tested using market research; say, for example, that it turns out to be 80%. In this case, 80 people would receive a "first generation" forwarded message. From there it would decline roughly exponentially, so that each generation would be smaller than the next, as 80, 64, 51.2, 40.96, 32.768, 26.214, 20.971, 16.777, 13.421, 10.737.

Eventually the campaign would fade out. Research must be carried out on the life expectancy of such a campaign. More complicated formulas can be generated, but this would be the easiest for most marketing departments to work out. So the final campaign would cost the original amount of funds needed to send the email to 100 users and the rest (357, in this case) would be users marketed by viral methods and normally for free.

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Types, Methods, and Barriers

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Types of viral messages

  • Pass-along: A message which encourages the user to send the message to others. The crudest form of this is chain letters where a message at the bottom of the e-mail prompts the reader to forward the message. More effective are short, funny clips of video which people spontaneously forward. Many of these, such as the Cog (television commercial) from Honda began life as TV commercials and have since circulated on the web by word of mouth. The number of people reached in this way is often much greater than the number who viewed the original ad.
  • Incentivised viral: Offering rewards for providing someone's address. This can dramatically increase referrals. However, this is most effective when the offer requires another person to take action. Most online contests offer more chances of winning for each referral given; but when the referral must also participate in order for the first person to obtain that extra chance of winning, the chance that the referral participates is much greater.
  • Undercover: A viral message presented as a cool or unusual page, activity, or piece of news, without obvious incitements to link or pass along. In Undercover Marketing, it is not immediately apparent that anything is being marketed. Particular effort is made to make the discovery of the item seem spontaneous and informal, to encourage natural memetic behavior. Outside world "clues", such as graffiti appearing in cities with key viral words, is often used to direct people to search out the presented "mystery". Because of the large amount of unusual and entertaining content on the internet, this can be the hardest type of viral to spot, especially as companies try to imitate the style and content of amateur websites and authentic underground movements.
  • "Edgy Gossip/Buzz marketing" ads or messages that create controversy by challenging the borders of taste or appropriateness. Discussion of the resulting controversy can be considered to generate buzz and word of mouth advertising. Prior to releasing a movie, some Hollywood movie stars get married, get divorced, or get arrested, or become involved in some controversy that directs conversational attention to them. An alleged example is the publicity campaign about the dubious love affair between Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes that came out just before each of them released a movie. [1] [2]
  • Anonymous matching services require each user to create a confidential list of friends and acquaintances they are interested in dating. A match only occurs if the object of their affection reciprocates by logging in and placing them on their own secret list; thus, each user has an incentive to get their crushes to visit the site. Most of these services allow users to email recipients anonymous messages informing them that an undisclosed person has a crush on them. On eCRUSH, one system using this methodology, 20% of the email recipients start accounts of their own. A Business 2.0 article noted, "eCrush is intrinsically viral – hopeful romantics become eCrush marketers as they try to find out if their crushes return their ardor" [3].
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Methods of transmission

Transmission of viral marketing can occur in various ways:

  • Word of Web: Typing into a web-based form that converts that information into an e-mail, sends to recipients. An example of this is any article at MSNBC.com. In the article, there are links that encourage you to send to a friend; this brings you to a web-based form that you fill out, and this form converts all of the information to the recipient in an e-mail.
  • Word of E-Mail: The most common type: forwarding e-mails, such as jokes, quizzes and 'compromising' pictures.
  • Word of mouth
  • Word of IM: Perhaps the fastest-growing mode of transmission, hyperlinks are sent over instant messaging servers such as AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo!, or Google IM. This method is popular with many young people who are arguably more likely to trust a link sent by a friend via IM than by that same friend through e-mail.
  • Reward for Referrals: Sometimes, the marketing company offers a reward for referring customers, encouraging you to use any of the above methods.
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Barriers to viral marketing

  • Size: If viral content is a video clip or streaming video, it may be too large for the recipient to receive. However, newer technologies are eliminating this problem, as internet connections grow faster and e-mail inboxes become more capable of receiving large files.
  • Media Format: A viral marketing campaign will be unsuccessful if the message is in a format that most people can't use; for example if particular software is needed that is not widely used, then people will not be able to open or view the message.
  • Email Attachment: Many people receive viral marketing messages while at the office, and company anti-virus software or firewalls can prevent people from receiving or viewing such attachments.
  • Cumbersome Referral Mechanism: For a viral marketing campaign to be successful, it must be easy to use. For example, if the promotion is some sort of game or contest, then asking for referrals should be an option immediately after the game, not as a condition to play.
  • Sabotage: Especially in the case of Undercover style marketing campaigns, the discovery of the marketing nature of a popular campaign may cause the same social networks to inform people of the commercial intent of the meme, and promote a formal or informal boycott of the company or product in question.
  • sms forwarding
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Examples of viral marketing

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See also

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External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_marketing"
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