Viral Marketing

Viral Marketing
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Viral Marketing?

Almost everyone in their lives will get a virus of some kind; there are millions out there, from the simple flu virus to its more deadly and exotic relatives. A virus has common characteristics:

• It replicates itself
• Its uses its host resources
• It spreads itself to other hosts

But how can a virus help us with marketing?
If you apply the same principles as above to a marketing campaign, you get a rather ingenious way of getting your message across – a marketing campaign that:

• Replicates itself – leaflets, posters etc are expensive to reproduce, a viral marketing campaign doesn’t cost any more than the initial set up
• A viral campaign uses the host resources of the user viewing it, i.e., their email inboxes
• It spreads itself, propels itself through cyberspace with very little maintenance from the marketing team.

So Viral marketing is a new and wonderful phenomenon?
Nope, it’s been around for ages but to this day has only been used successfully on a small number of occasions. No one is quite sure who first coined the term ‘viral marketing’ but one of its first uses was from Microsoft in its hotmail program. At the bottom of every email sent from a hotmail account was a small tagline: "Get your private, free email at hotmail.com". When people saw this, they then may have decided to get their own hotmail account. Every email then sent from theses new accounts would have included that line too. Microsoft did very little to spread the word, there was no huge multi million television advertising campaign, they relied upon web users in a ‘word of mouth’ way.

Why have I never heard of it before ?
The best viral marketing campaigns are ideas that the user develops themselves, take the Blair Witch Project for example, although I thought the film was pretty mediocre, the marketing and hype involved was phenomenal, the makers created a web site about the ‘Legend of the Blair Witch’, not stating whether it was fiction or not, simply planted an idea in the minds of the audience. They then elaborated slightly more saying that there were videos found of people who had gone missing in the woods, etc. Before long, the media were involved and the film was one of the biggest box office hits of the year round the world. Accident? No, a carefully planned viral marketing campaign, like the virus, the marketing team behind this used the media, word of mouth, rumour mills to spread the word, other resources.

Roughly, only 10% of all viral marketing campaigns will have success, why?
Because they need to follow a number of rules. If someone sends you an email selling a product or service, you may be interested, you may not, its highly unlikely you will send it on to your contact list, yet if someone sends you something humorous or a fantastic offer, you are likely to pass it on, spreading the word yourself so to speak.

So what makes a good viral marketing project?

1. Gives away products or services – There have to be a reason why people want to tell others about your campaign. If people think they are getting something for nothing, they will tell their friends. People will not forward an email that has no benefit to them or others.
2. Provides for effortless transfer to others – Chain letters always died, as the host would have to actually do some physical work, rewriting addresses, purchasing stamps etc. Now, with the Internet as the communication medium, very little is needed to transfer the message, its as simple as a few clicks of the mouse button to forward an email.
3. Scales easily from small to very large – A viral campaign spreads exponentially. If every person that receives it forwards it to 10 of their contacts, you’ve reached a thousand people only 4 steps down the line. This can cause problems sometimes (read below)
4. Exploits common motivations and behaviors - Greed drives humans, so does popularity and the thought of being loved. A successful campaign will use these motivations.
5. Utilizes existing communication networks – Human networks should be used to the advantage of the marketing campaign. Research has proven that most people have a close relationship with approximately 8 people although their networks can stretch to thousands. Imagine someone working in a bar, they may come into contact with hundreds of people over the course of a week.
6. Takes advantage of others' resources – Using other resources (inbox space, links from others web sites), to spread the word with little or no effort on the part of the marketing team.

This sounds easy, what’s the catch?
There is none. Simply put, a viral campaign is doomed from the start if the item or service has no ‘viral value’. For instance, a company selling carpets mails a thousand people with a simple email explaining about their new colour range. How many of this thousand will forward the email on to others? Very few and the email will soon die. Too many marketing campaigns have tried viral marketing and failed due to the fact that it didn’t suit their services, like a flu virus, some just don’t catch it.

Another major problem is the growth of a successful campaign. If a viral email is created and forwarded, a few steps down the chain, it has reached over 100,000 people. If this email is pointing to a website, can it cope with 100,000 hits in a short period or will it go down? If the website ‘dies’, the emails are next to useless.

The viral email is a distant cousin of spam according to some ‘experts’. Although different approaches are used, it can be looked upon disapprovingly from some people although its doubtful, it can ever be traced back to one person.

This article is based upon viral marketing over the Internet but there are a lot more forms such as pyramid selling schemes that may be worth checking out.

Bruce
Razormedia
Boardroom Moderator

also posted in upcoming newsletter and on actionscript.com

Yes, viral marketing can be good sometimes..I remember the Guiness one well.

But I hope you aren't condoning Pyramid schemes, ie the paragraph at the bottom..
Pyramid schemes prey on people looking for quick fixes when they are in dire straits and are illegal here in Australia, tho' I don't know about other countries.

?

James

I'm not promoting pyramid selling schemes at all, maybe that wording could have been slightly better.

like spam, they're no go in my book but viral marketing is sometimes viewed in the same light.

I highly recommend to you Seth Godin's book "Unleashing the Ideavirus" - it goes over viral marketing in depth. It's available in paperback OR FREE ONLINE at http://www.ideavirus.com

As a marketer, I found it to be a good read.

I want to point out, a successful viral marketing campaign is not necessarily based on a permission or email marketing strategy. Or even the internet for that matter.

Viral marketing is unwanted, just like a virus. It feeds off the fact that people pass good news onto each other and trys to latch onto the system, often succesfully. I hate spam, and I hate viral marketing.

Incidentally, I also dislike bad spelling and bad grammar: In the flashkit newsletter, which i subscribe to for news about flash and not about marketing, it is worth noting that "compliment" is different to "complement".

In case you think I only grouse, I do love good cooking and good actionscript.

Those little videos friends send you are also viral marketing... bet you send them on too.

RazoRmedia is right, viral marketing - if done properly - is fantastic. Now if I could just get it right. :D

Quote:

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Originally posted by danjames
Viral marketing is unwanted, just like a virus. It feeds off the fact that people pass good news onto each other and trys to latch onto the system, often succesfully. I hate spam, and I hate viral marketing.

Incidentally, I also dislike bad spelling and bad grammar: In the flashkit newsletter, which i subscribe to for news about flash and not about marketing, it is worth noting that "compliment" is different to "complement".

In case you think I only grouse, I do love good cooking and good actionscript.

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I think it's too bad that you don't like bad spellign and grammr. :) Spam is not viral marketing, and viral marketing is not spam. Viral marketing is using an established, natural method of spreading that people are willing to do (unlike a real virus.) One of the most successful viral marketing campaigns was Hotmail, in which they offered free email, only to further their product by tagging the end of every message with "get free email at http://www.hotmail.com". This method, like many other successful viral marketing campaigns, is unobtrusive to the recipient, and freely spreads itself until it has saturated it's life-cycle.

In addition, I'd like to say that one of the areas the Flashkit newsletter has lacked for quite some time is actually how to make money with your skills... and that void has now been filled. Does that mean the newsletter does not/cannot have flash news? No. I've been quite impressed with the new direction of the NL, as have many others. What is great is the freedom to skip over things you could care less about reading... so feel free to do so.

Jay

Originally posted by danjames

Viral marketing is unwanted, just like a virus. It feeds off the fact that people pass good news onto each other and trys to latch onto the system, often succesfully. I hate spam, and I hate viral marketing.
How can you class such a large area of marketing as unwanted? Thats like saying because some websites are terrible, the web is awful, it is not, some areas of the web are fantastic. Do friends ever send you emails which are just jokes or funny pictures? Mine do and if I find them funny, I pass them on. Viral marketing does indeed latch onto this but read the quote

Quote:

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1. Gives away products or services – There have to be a reason why people want to tell others about your campaign. If people think they are getting something for nothing, they will tell their friends. People will not forward an email that has no benefit to them or others.

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People are only going to forward stuff to you they think is relevant, like jabez says above, if you do not like it, simply ignore or delete it, its hardly a major intrusion seeing as, unlike spam, you receive it once from one source.

Incidentally, I also dislike bad spelling and bad grammar: In the flashkit newsletter, which i subscribe to for news about flash and not about marketing, it is worth noting that "compliment" is different to "complement".
Good point, 'i' should always be a capital when used on its own too. The newsletter is indeed from flashkit but flashkit is focused on the flash industry, not just open source movies and tutorials. A growing part of the flash industry is marketing, and indeed viral marketing which flash is ideal for.

In case you think I only grouse, I do love good cooking and good actionscript.
Me too, thankyou for your feedback, I would ask you to keep checking this article as I'm sure others are more experienced at viral marketing and will show you the benefits better than I can

Greetings Chaps:

The "Viral Marketing" you speak of, is, in essence, what is entailed or known as a "meme". If you are not familiar with the term, a meme is basically an idea, or marketable campaign, thought of in exactly the biological terms you put it in. Regardless of who coined the term "viral marketing", it is most likely an offshoot of the work done by Richard Dawkins, and Richard Brodie. And excellent text, "Virus of the Mind", authored by Richard Brodie, expounds upon Dawkins' initial work in memetics, the science of the meme, if you have not read the book already, it is an excellent reference for the how, why, and how-to of creating a function and successful mind virus (Such as THE most successful, religion).

I just wanted to share such, in the case you are not familiar with these fellows and their works. An excellent resource.

(The entire message above shows the aforementioned books' ability to create such an effective mind virus, that I am now posting to you and recommending it, thus continuing the existence of the "fit meme", or mind virus.)

Jeff. Standard.
[email protected]

thanks a lot Jeff

I would say that bad viral marketing would nearly be spam. I spend ages weeding through my inbox somtimes with lots of "cool" things I get sent by friends, they mindlessly just hit send apparently. Though, small flash games (I've only got one of two mind you) are quite nice little examples of viral marketing usually.

Maybe I'm just a bit jaded, but forwarded email irritates me. Particularly annoying are emails forwarded to everyone in the sender's address book
or the infinitely nested .eml attachment. If the message isn't important enough to direct to a specific person or relevant group, it gets deleted (unread). Attachments that I am not expecting or that aren't described by the sender, also get deleted (unopened).
Lastly, any active content (executables) that aren't work/project related, get the axe. It's a sad reflection of the times, but opening/running
unknown content is too risky. An interesting article on wired.com: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,52055,00.html
drives this point home. Would a client ever hire you again if you inadvertantly infected their network?

Greetings chaps:

I most certainly agree that spam, unknown attachtments and forwarded mail are both irritating and, to certain people, poor types of marketing. All of these would be "bad" examples of viral marketing, which give the "viral" part, the poor connotation.

Viral marketing is not a bad thing, in lieu of the bad connotations we ascribe to a biological "virus", as "bad" or "negative". Viral marketing is a new intpretation, which allows for idea engineering and perpetuation. The best, and most successful "mind virus" (remember virus != bad, there are good viruses out there as well) is religion.

Religion has been carefully engineered (I realize to devote catholics and christians have already written me off as the anti-christ at this point, but please, bear the storm here) throughout the years, to become more successful at spreading, and perpetuating its existence. What makes religion so successful? Why, the very same things a that make a virus successful.

1. Gives away products and services:
Religion gives away something very high in demand, and something that very much makes others want to "spread" the idea to others: Eternal salvation.

2. Provides effortless transfer to others:
How hard is it really to transfer religion to others? We grow up with it from our parents and peers, you don't have to "buy" anything so to speak, just a donation here and there, to help perpetuate the existence and evolution of the idea.


I could continue along all of these similar lines, just further enforcing the point that viral marketing is simply an interpretation, but a very accurate, and highly useful interpretation.

Surely, bad examples of viral marketing fall flat on their idealistic faces, and quite as they should, the ideas weren't "fit" to propagate. But, look at the successful ones, such as hotmail and religion, and numerous other examples. You can think of ideas as with biology, the fit "memes" or ideas propagate, and "infect" many hosts, thus perpetuating their existence. While the unfit memes silently fail, and slough away.

In conclusion, just hitting forward, does not necessarily connote a prime example of viral marketing. The good examples are when you see the glimpse, and you wish to inquire further. So, pay attention to those phrases, and ideas that make *you* want to latch on, and become infected, some are inadvertently successful, others, such as hotmail are carefully crafted to be simple enough, yet provocative enough to garner attention.


Jeff. Standard.
[email protected] <--- Note, I too, am infected. :>

Thanks jeff,

I think some people are finding it hard to find a distinction between spam and viral marketing. Poorly contrived and executed viral marketing could, in some essences, be perceived as spam.

Imagine it like flash, anyone can create a crappy flash website, its very easy, but it takes good design skills and clever coding to create something which people will return to and tell their friends about.

Viral marketing is like this. It sounds easy enough to carry out, but simply sending a few emails and then waiting for your colleagues / friends to forward them isn't as easy as it sounds, it takes careful preparation, planning and a hell of a lot of research.

Heard a good joke recently and told someone else? See if you remember the same joke in a months time to tell others!

The distinction between spam and viral marketing is decided on by the receiver of the email.

If the receiver has placed their email address on a mailing list with consent to receive emails then that's different to spam which is primarily manged by bots trolling websites for any strings matching a email addy regular expression.

Still there are these points to consider -
1. The receiver might have forgotten they subscribed or consented to being on an email list.
2. Always have the unsubscribe option. Who's to say the email address was added by them and not someone else
3. Bandwidth - will any attachments sent be small enough for dial up users to onsend? I have idiot friends who send me 800k attachments or uncompressed images.

An example of bad marketing happened here in Australia with the recent Winter Olympic broadcast.
About 20000 people had joined up a list to become a volunteer for the faux Australian bid for the 2010 Winter Olympics, run by two comedians Roy and HG.
This is all they signed up for. Unfortunately the TV channel involved decided to use those 20k emails to send out various promotions and sales of gear after the event.

Moral : make sure the user has signed up to receive your viral piece, just because a user signs up for something on a site doesn't mean they can automatically be added to a viral target list.

my thoughts
James

there is no list.

viral email marketing starts off by being sent to a few people, namely those close to the person, colleagues, friends etc. They then send it on to their friends, colleagues etc if they so choose. These email addresses are not trapped and listed, there is no listing, that would be spam. viral email marketing gets others to propel your message for you.

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...starts off by being sent to a few people...

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I know - I'm talking about the initial list of people, as you state above.

Whether it friends, colleagues or people who have signed up via your site, there still has to be an initial list of addys to get it going.

Once the initial list is exhausted the action stops and you let them do the forwarding.

cheers

James