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.

A THOUGHT ON ONLINE CONTENT MARKETING

Internet marketing is still an experimental area that continues to grow, evolve and adapt. With the virtual limitlessness space of the "WWW", the strategic placement of internet advertisements is much more complex and goes beyond the traditional marketing approach of researching demographics. Several attempts have been made through the fields of technology and marketing to overcome the anonymousness of the computer user's interests and preferences to move toward a direct behavioral approach to online marketing.
It may be hard to believe, but the Internet as we know it is just over 11 years old. Given this basic fact, where does online content marketing go from here?

Though the internet is growing much faster than ever before, the more and more user generated content is flooding the internet but the future of online Marketing is still a matter to discuss. Many say that the future of online marketing is very bright, more and more people are doing these businesses as internet grows and more and more new technologies are being developed.
E-commerce has grown by leaps and bounds and continues to set new marks every year. As comfortable as you and I might be using the Internet, it is really only in its infancy. As huge as Google is, it was only created in 1998.

And, how far we have come!
As the Internet continues to grow, the future of online marketing is a much discussed subject. There is little doubt the future is bright. As more people join up with digital revolution, e-commerce continues to grow. Still, one can’t help but acknowledge Internet users are becoming more sophisticated, particularly as a younger generation moves into adulthood.
Right now Online Marketing is little "unmanaged" , banner ads and email marketing are loosing its momentum since users donate click on banners and emails sent in bulks generally go to spam or phising scams , this has really become too risky. Remnants of the old, such as banner ads and email marketing, are clearly one their way out. Banner ads produce horrific click through rates because people are wary of getting stuck on a site they can’t get away from. Email marketing is still haunted by problems such as spam, phishing scams and identity theft concerns.
The dominant models now are pay-per-click ("PPC") advertising and search engine optimization. Search engine optimization will be around as long as people use search engines. The promise of free traffic is simply too glorious to ignore. Since it is fairly difficult to commit fraud in search engine optimization, it is difficult to see any future legal issues threatening it.

So, what is the future of online marketing in light of the above comments? In my personal view, search engine optimization will remain the dominant online marketing method.Search engine optimization is one revolutionary model of online marketing, while you optimize your site for search engines and the free traffic you get is just too hard to ignore.
"PPC" will also continue, but will be modified into something used to conquer click fraud. I also think information publishing in the form of free copyright articles will become more and more dominant. Combined, these three platforms represent the future of online marketing. Of course, nobody could have foreseen the explosion of EBay ten years ago, so we may all be surprised by where things stand in five or ten years.

The emerging models of online marketing now are PPC, Contextual ads, in-text ads, etc. People working in online marketing are trying hard to find new techniques of marketing their product, since more users have become more intelligent in using internet than before so it has become very hard to show ads on website, because most users will find it easy to differentiate between ads and content.

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE WITH SOCIAL NETWORKS?

Wikipedia describes Social Network Services as:

"A social network service focuses on building online communities of people who share interests and/or activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. Most social network services are web based and provide a variety of ways for users to interact, such as e-mail and instant messaging services.
Social networking has encouraged new ways to communicate and share information. Social networking websites are being used regularly by millions of people, and it now seems that social networking will be an enduring part of everyday life.
While it could be said that email and websites have most of the essential elements of social network services, the idea of proprietary encapsulated services has gained popular uptake relatively recently.
The main types of social networking services are those which contain category divisions (such as former school-year or classmates), means to connect with friends (usually with self-description pages) and a recommendation system linked to trust. Popular methods now combine many of these, with MySpace, Nexopia, Bebo,Facebook, Hi5, MySpace, Tagged, Xing and Skyrock,Friendster, Orkut, Xiaonei and Cyworld."

But to a guy/girl who wanst to have a laydown prespective for the whole core idea behind Social Networking it means a bit different.

Social networking is the practice of expanding the number of one's business and/or social contacts by making connections through individuals. While social networking has gone on almost as long as societies themselves have existed, the unparalleled potential of the Internet to promote such connections is only now being fully recognized and exploited, through Web-based groups established for that purpose.
Based on the "six degrees of separation" concept (the idea that any two people on the planet could make contact through a chain of no more than five intermediaries), social networking establishes interconnected Internet communities (sometimes known as personal networks) that help people make contacts that would be good for them to know, but that they would be unlikely to have met otherwise. In general, here's how it works: you join one of the sites and invite people you know to join as well. Those people invite their contacts to join, who in turn invite their contacts to join, and the process repeats for each person. In theory, any individual can make contact through anyone they have a connection to, to any of the people that person has a connection to, and so on.

Chris Pirillo, a guy whom any social networking(specially twitter or facebook) neard will know says the reason why social networks are so popular is that they allow people to keep track of their friends easily. The idea is that you can have one place to visit to keep up with everyone in your network.

Of course, the problem is that there are so many social networks that it’s almost impossible to keep track of your friends. These networks - Facebook, YouTube, MySpace - don’t interact with each other cleanly.

So where does it all go????

Perhaps social networking is reaching a saturation point as it matures, but that's not to say that it's all doom-and-gloom. Many people are still joining social networks, and, with each new generation, social networking will become even more of a part of life than it was for the generation prior. Whether MySpace and Facebook will always be the hot properties that they are today is yet to be seen, but the rise of new sites like Twitter, for example, shows that there's still potential for new social networks to rise up and gain mainstream appeal.But users will want to manage their identities in a unified manner and to have the kind of openness that would allow them to map friends list across different services.
The application of social networks like MySpace and Facebook in a business context has been an issue of late. But doing things in the right way at the right time can make anything happen....so that does means it never ends....

A question was asked about the MySpace, Facebook and a few others owning the social networking space in the long term. “The lesson from the Internet is that it’s never game over,” Katz said. Indeed, looking back over the last decade you can see the leapfrogging that went on in the search arena.

WHY TWITTER?

Why? Yeah why you use twitter? What's so important about twitter?

With twitter we can do some sending short message to keep updates online wherever wego. We can get some friends with and we can get some extra traffic from there with a smart way. I love using Twitter, to ask for help, to keep up w/ the news, to feel connected to people. To tweet about other news or my thoughts or just to send a shout out to whats happening where i am & anywhere else.

But whats the flipside on people's mind???

You are watching TV, making your dinner, getting ready for a meeting or whatever... and you stop what you are doing to go to your computer and write few words about what you are (were, you stopped) doing.Does it make much sense???

Some people really don't see a reason on that.But hey, there will always be people who don't feel any usefulness on sites like facebook, myspace or whatever. So, it is natural that they may not understand why the people use twitter.They have their own way of getting across people and places.

Maybe to feel connected to the world...

Many of us use twitter to stay up to date with web trends, to make contacts with people.Having a few entreprenual ideas and being on Twitter comes in very handy. And to keep learning something new every hour!

Twitter allows followers to see another side on an individual - not just the business side (linkedin) nor just the Social side (facebook) but both. And its amazing how we get almost immediate answers to questions.

Some good reasons many people think Twitter is really helpful. Mostly all of these reasons can be figured out once u use it.
Make existing professional relationships stronger and more intimate.

Get questions answered.A broadcast message to those paying attention is a lightweight non-intrusive way to do it. Expand your professional network. By paying attention to @ messages, you see who people you’re working with are working with. Promote your blog posts. Watching what people are interested in. Find out when your colleagues are available for a chat. Learn important news.

All these and more and more and more as we keep using Twitter and keep pushing our boundaries to fing newer ways to share, distribute, dissapiate & converge information.