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Viral Marketing

© Bert Markgraf

The word "marketing" has an ominous enough ring to it so I'm not sure "viral marketing" is going to be looked at as a benign process by customers but, whatever you call it, it works. Where marketing deals with the control and diffusion of information to customers, viral marketing spreads information the same way viruses spread - by multiplying the bits of information and propagating them throughout the target market with little or no effort on the part of the original source.

Great. What do you need to do this? The hard part is the actual "virus". It has to be valuable in the sense that people will want to give it to others. It has to be rugged so that it doesn't deteriorate when copied and it has to be easy to reproduce. Finally, to be useful to you, it has to be somehow identified with you. Once you have an item which has these properties, you can launch it and watch it spread the word about your company.

Viral marketing has really come into its own on the Internet. Before, it took much more time and effort to make something spread but now software and e-mail are ideal vehicles. Shareware is propagated through viral marketing and all the free services on the Internet use viral marketing when they display a link to their site whenever you use the service. The trick is for businesses which don't offer strictly Internet-related services to develop strategies which can take advantage of viral marketing.

A good web site to research this new phenomenon is Viral Marketers. It gives definitions and a discussion of how viral marketing works. The case study section of viral marketer gives good examples of viral marketing, such as hotmail, and, finally here, on infoworld is an article on how viral marketing should not be used.

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