Viral marketing: The flow uninterrupted

Technically, viral marketing refers to a Marketing strategy which  facilitates and encourages individuals to pass forward a marketing message creating the potential for exponential growth in message’s ifluence and exposure. Though not authentic, the history of this term and its coining is attributed to Jeffery Rayport, in December 1996 article for The Virus of Marketing. The term was further popularized by Tim Draper and Steve Jurvetson in 1997 to describe Hotmail’s e-mail practice of appending advertising for itself in outgoing mail from their users.

In the beginning, all the start ups have a viral marketing strategy in their scheme of things, especially as far as B2C marketing is considered. However, not many are able to carry it forward effectively. For some, it clicks and for others, it just fizzles out. The success here primarily depends on the passage percentage i.e how many people pass forward what they come across. Here, a key observation to be kept in mind is that one satisfied customer shares his/her happiness with 3 people, where as an unsatisfied customer shares the same with 10 people.

The few key ( surprisingly simple) principles of viral marketing are:

•   Give away products or services free of cost
•   Provides for effortless transfers forward
•   Scalability should be smooth and easy
•   Play on common motivations and behaviors
•   Utilize existing communication network
•   Make most of others’ resources ( e.g. putting your ads on sites which don’t cost you a fortune)

Thinking of the most successful viral campaigns, Hotmail stands out as a clear winner, but closely following it is the million dollar homepage case. For some more examples, you may look into http://danzarrella.com/examples-of-viral-marketing-campaigns.html.

But then why does everyone not jump into this bandwagon, or more importantly, why is not everyone successful in these endeavors. It is supposed to be the big bang, but many a times ends in whimper. But what are the few things, that work so good for some, but others just falter. A concise list of the same can be mentioned as:

• The name and positioning of entire effort (IT DOES MATTER)
• The word SPAM will sound the death knell for you
• Whom to target- You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time
• How do you go about? You need to be innovative, and same medicine can not cure all
• However, never compromise on your ethics, else the hard word of ages will go down the drain in a fraction of second.

Please feel free to contact if you have any queries about the same.