Viral Marketing

Definition
•A marketing tactic relying upon some aspect of the system to cause the promotion to propagate itself as initial targets pass the promotion onto others.
•Viral marketing is a way to promote a service or product exponentially. When effectively done one person will give it to several people who in turn will promote it to several other people. This is what makes viral marketing so effective. For instance, if A gave a book, and then B forwarded that book to 10 people, who in turn forwarded that book to 10 people. One hundred people have read that same book. Now if it is forwarded that same way just four more times ONE MILLION PEOPLE have now read that same book. By definition viral marketing gives the consumer something that they can use for free with the intent of gaining that customer to market other products and to create brand name awareness.
Off the Internet, viral marketing has been referred to as "word-of-mouth," "creating a buzz," "leveraging the media," "network marketing." But on the Internet, for better or worse, it's called "viral marketing." While others smarter than I have attempted to rename it, to somehow domesticate and tame it, I won't try. The term "viral marketing" has stuck.
The Classic Hotmail.com Example
The classic example of viral marketing is Hotmail.com, one of the first free Web-based e-mail services. The strategy is simple:
1.Give away free e-mail addresses and services,
2.Attach a simple tag at the bottom of every free message sent out: "Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com" and,
3.Then stand back while people e-mail to their own network of friends and associates,
4.Who see the message,
5.Sign up for their own free e-mail service, and then
6.Propel the message still wider to their own ever-increasing circles of friends and associates.
Like tiny waves spreading ever farther from a single pebble dropped into a pond, a carefully designed viral marketing strategy ripples outward extremely rapidly.

Elements of a Viral Marketing Strategy
Accept this fact. Some viral marketing strategies work better than others, and few work as well as the simple Hotmail.com strategy. But below are the six basic elements you hope to include in your strategy. A viral marketing strategy need not contain ALL these elements, but the more elements it embraces, the more powerful the results are likely to be. An effective viral marketing strategy:
1.Gives away products or services
2.Provides for effortless transfer to others
3.Scales easily from small to very large
4.Exploits common motivations and behaviors
5.Utilizes existing communication networks
6.Takes advantage of others' resources

1. Gives Away Valuable Products or Services
"Free" is the most powerful word in a marketer's vocabulary. Most viral marketing programs give away valuable products or services to attract attention. Free e-mail services, free information, free "cool" buttons, free software programs that perform powerful functions but not as much as you get in the "pro" version. Wilson's Second Law of Web Marketing is "The Law of Giving and Selling"(http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmta/basic-principles.htm). "Cheap" or "inexpensive" may generate a wave of interest, but "free" will usually do it much faster. Viral marketers practice delayed gratification. They may not profit today, or tomorrow, but if they can generate a groundswell of interest from something free, they know they will profit "soon and for the rest of their lives" (with apologies to "Casablanca"). Patience, my friends. Free attracts eyeballs. Eyeballs then see other desirable things that you are selling, and, presto! You earn money. Eyeballs bring valuable e-mail addresses, advertising revenue, and e-commerce sales opportunities. Give away something, sell something.

2. Provides for Effortless Transfer to Others
Public health nurses offer sage advice at flu season: stay away from people who cough, wash your hands often, and don't touch your eyes, nose, or mouth. Viruses only spread when they're easy to transmit. The medium that carries your marketing message must be easy to transfer and replicate: e-mail, website, graphic, software download. Viral marketing works famously on the Internet because instant communication has become so easy and inexpensive. Digital format make copying simple. From a marketing standpoint, you must simplify your marketing message so it can be transmitted easily and without degradation. Short is better. The classic is: "Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com." The message is compelling, compressed, and copied at the bottom of every free e-mail message.

3. Scales Easily from Small to very Large
To spread like wildfire the transmission method must be rapidly scalable from small to very large. The weakness of the Hotmail model is that a free e-mail service requires its own mail servers to transmit the message. If the strategy is wildly successful, mail servers must be added very quickly or the rapid growth will bog down and die. If the virus multiplies only to kill the host before spreading, nothing is accomplished. So long as you have planned ahead of time how you can add mail servers rapidly you're okay. You must build in scalability to your viral model.

4. Exploits Common Motivations and Behaviors
Clever viral marketing plans take advantage of common human motivations. What proliferated "Netscape Now" buttons in the early days of the Web? The desire to be cool. Greed drives people. So does the hunger to be popular, loved, and understood. The resulting urge to communicate produces millions of websites and billions of e-mail messages. Design a marketing strategy that builds on common motivations and behaviors for its transmission, and you have a winner.

5. Utilizes Existing Communication Networks
Most people are social. Nerdy, basement-dwelling computer science grad students are the exception. Social scientists tell us that each person has a network of 8 to 12 people in their close network of friends, family, and associates. A person's broader network may consist of scores, hundreds, or thousands of people, depending upon her position in society. A waitress, for example, may communicate regularly with hundreds of customers in a given week. Network marketers have long understood the power of these human networks, both the strong, close networks as well as the weaker networked relationships. People on the Internet develop networks of relationships, too. They collect e-mail addresses and favorite website URLs. Affiliate programs exploit such networks, as do permission e-mail lists. Learn to place your message into existing communications between people, and you rapidly multiply its dispersion.

6. Takes Advantage of others' Resources
The most creative viral marketing plans use others' resources to get the word out. Affiliate programs, for example, place text or graphic links on others' websites. Authors, who give away free articles, seek to position their articles on others' WebPages. A news release can be picked up by hundreds of periodicals and form the basis of articles seen by hundreds of thousands of readers. Now someone else's newsprint or webpage is relaying your marketing message. Someone else's resources are depleted rather than your own.

Advantages of Viral Marketing
The advantages of viral marketing service are high credibility, low costs, great reach, high efficiency and the opportunity to continuous promotion adjustments. The main reasons for the wide popularity of viral marketing are:
•Socializing and networking has now made very closer to the people. So relatives and friends are simply accessible over the net.
•Viral marketing is one of the cost-free methods for promoting a business transaction.
•The time and resources are easily available. In this type of marketing, one person contacting their friends or relatives. They contacted more and more people and the chain goes on. It generates revenue from advertisement.
In spite of the probable risks, viral marketing has the ability to draw the greatest potential audience at a convincingly low cost, raising the reach of your business.

Pitfalls of Viral Marketing
1.Brand Dilution
2.Association with unknown groups
3.Avoid making purely financial-based offer
4.Large-scale spam issues