Wednesday, April 1, 2009

VIRAL MARKETING?????

Viral Marketing???? Whats the Big Talk about????
The words viral marketing and viral advertising refer to some specific marketing techniques that use pre-existing social channels/networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives through self-replicating viral processes, just the way it is done in case of pathological and computer viruses.
From word-of-mouth delivered or enhanced by the network effects of the Internet.Viral promotions may take the form of video clips, interactive Flash games, advergames, ebooks, brandable software, images, or even text messages. The basic form of viral marketing is not dependable directly with any of these networks nor are they infinitely sustainable.
Wikipedia says and I Quote:
"The term Viral Marketing was coined by a Harvard Business School graduate, Tim Draper. The term was later 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."
The way all these happens is that if such an "ad" reaches a "susceptible" user, that user will become "infected" in medical terms (accept the idea) and will then go on to share the idea with others "infecting them," again in medical terms.
Every time each infected user shares the idea with more than one susceptible user on average, the number of infected users will grow according to a logistic curve, whose initial segment appears exponential. Of course, the whole of the marketing initiative may be wildly successful even if the rate at which things are spread isn't of epidemic proportions(if we call that in the medical terms), if this user-to-user sharing is sustained by other forms of marketing communications, such as public relations or advertising which are again the mainstream of marketing. Viral marketing is measured along many parameters but one of the most important is the high pass-along rate from person to person. If a large percentage of recipients forward something to a large number of others, the overall growth becomes very quick.
On the Web, viral marketing is any type of marketing technique that induces Web sites or users to pass on a marketing message to other sites or users, creating a potentially exponential growth in the message's visibility and effect.
There are tons of example both in Indian context and adboad ,one example of successful viral marketing is Hotmail, a company, now owned by Microsoft, that promotes its service and its own advertisers' messages in every user's e-mail notes.
Though the success and failure will be exclusively on the manner its done and the potential of the medium used but there are some basic points which can be taken care of so as to ensure maximum success :
  • Start your Viral Internet Marketing campaign with an end in mind.
  • Spend the time developing a campaign which will speak to your audience.
  • Allow (and Encourage) multiple Viral Internet Marketing “infections strains”.
  • Offer a compelling reason to “spread the infection”.
  • Allow personalization of “Refer a Friend” fields.
  • Give things a little push in the right direction.
  • Test and Measure the whole process and the parameters used in the campaign.

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