What is viral marketing
If you have been in webmaster business for some time you must have heard of the terms ‘viral marketing’, but did you bother to check out what it actually means?
From wikipedia.. Viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce exponential increases in brand awareness, through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of a computer virus. It can often be word-of-mouth delivered and enhanced online; it can harness the network effect of the Internet and can be very useful in reaching a large number of people rapidly.
Sounds complicated? Here’s my simple understanding.. Viral marketing starts with creating something that can really spark mass interest and that people are willing to spread the creation to their friends/associates, with their friends happily passing the news to theirs as well, thus creating an exponential effect to promote the created ’something’.
You can tell 10 of your friends, 10 of your friends tell 10 of theirs, and 10 of their friends tell 10 of.. blah blah.. Pretty soon millions of people will be getting your message; and off course in order to achieve that audience, the ’something’ that you created have to be interesting enough.
The ’something’ can be anything, commercial or non-commercial; from a product, webpage, joke to video etc. It can be something that are really interesting or useful, or it can be incentivized to create the buzz and viral effect.
To start a viral marketing campaign obviously you need something to market about, then you need to create the hype, and the initial group of contacts that you can spread out the words in order for them to start the viral process.
So you need to create something that’s really interesting, either by your creativity or by providing some cool freebies or incentives. And you need a good social networking, with people that are willing to start spreading your message to the mass.
It’s not something that can be easily done, but quite often one successful viral marketing can bring in huge effect to your publicity, for whatever it is. Definitely something worth learning and trying.