Viral Marketing
Viral marketing is a marketing phenomenon
that facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message
voluntarily. Viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing
techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases
in brand awareness, through self-replicating viral processes, analogous
to the spread of pathological and computer viruses.
It can be word-of-mouth delivered or enhanced by the network effects
of the Internet.
Viral promotions may take the form of funny video clips, interactive
Flash games, adver-games, images, or even text messages.
It is claimed that a satisfied customer tells an average of three people
about a product or service he/she likes, and eleven people about a product
or service which he/she did not like. Viral marketing is based on this
natural human behavior.
The goal of marketers interested
in creating successful viral marketing programs is to identify individuals
with high Social Networking Potential (SNP) and create Viral Messages
that appeal to this segment of the population and have a high probability
of being passed along.
The term "viral marketing"
is also sometimes used pejoratively to refer to stealth marketing campaigns
the use of varied kinds of astroturfing both online and offline to create
the impression of spontaneous word of mouth enthusiasm.
The term Viral Marketing
was coined by a Harvard Business School professor, Jeffrey F. Rayport,
in a December 1996 article for Fast Company The Virus of Marketing.
The term was further popularized by Tim Draper and Steve Jurvetson of
the venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson in 1997 to describe
Hotmail's e-mail practice of appending advertising for itself in outgoing
mail from their users.
Among the first to write
about viral marketing on the Internet was media critic Douglas Rushkoff
in his 1994 book Media Virus. 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 in epidemiology
imply that the number of infected users will grow according to a logistic
curve, whose initial segment appears exponential.
Among the first to write
about algorithms designed to identify people with high Social Networking
Potential is Bob Gerstley in Advertising Research is Changing. Gerstley
uses SNP algorithms in quantitative marketing research to help marketers
maximize the effectiveness of viral marketing campaigns.
Notable examples of viral
marketing
Business Week (2001) described web-based campaigns for Hotmail (1996)
and The Blair Witch Project (1999) as striking examples of viral marketing,
but warned of some dangers for imitation marketers.
Burger King's The Subservient
Chicken campaign was cited in Wired as a striking example of viral or
word-of-mouth marketing.
In 2000, Slate described TiVo's unpublicized gambit of giving free TiVo's
to web-savvy enthusiasts to create "viral" word of mouth, pointing out
that a viral campaign differs from a publicity stunt.
With the emergence of Web
2.0, mostly all web startups like facebook.com, youtube.com, collabotrade.com,
myspace.com, and digg.com have made well use of Viral Marketing by merging
it with the social networking
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