Viral Marketing: Easier said than done

On Feb, 2000 Ralph Wilson presented a definition of Viral Marketing:

"What does a virus have to do with marketing? Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message's exposure and influence. Like viruses, such strategies take advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to thousands, to millions.

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."

He mentions the Hotmail.com example, I must add that the same was followed by Yahoo Mail, where at the end of each message you could sign up for a free email account. Google took it a little bit deeper: "You have to be invited!" Well as it turned out people where selling invitations on eBay just to get a GMail account.

In the offline world: have you ever seen a mob of women waiting for the doors to open for a SALE at their favorite store? Well trust me that is Viral Marketing.

Elements for a Viral Marketing Strategy
There are lists and lists of elements. Bottom line these are the ones I believe you must comply with it to work.

1- Give something away that everybody would like to have. We will come back to this main element, and you will see why most Viral Marketing Campaigns fail.

2- It is effortlessly transferred to others. Boy, if you have to go out of your way, even a bit, it will not become Viral.

3- Scales easily. Yes, it has to be exponential. A Viral Marketing Campaign success also depends on the willingness of people to transmit and receive the "news". Good Gossip = Viral Marketing. People must want to be the first ones to get it and give it away to the people they know. Take GMail, you were very important when you get that invitation and had to choose 50 people to give accounts to. Suddenly you had ten times more friends and relatives.

4- Uses others' resources, otherwise is just an advertising campaign.

In the end. most Viral Marketing Campaigns are, out of chance, unintentionally

successful. Remember you are dealing with people and they decide if it will become Viral or not. Many Marketers are pressured by company CEO's to create a Viral Campaign, the truth is in the last 25 years I could count around 10 to 15 successful Viral Campaigns. So do not despair and DO NOT jump first to the plate offering to create a successful Viral Campaign. Maybe your company does not have anything to get Viral about.

Some of the successful Viral Campaigns I found are the following:

The trunk monkey ad, which turned Viral when someone placed the ad in the web.
Evite allows you to create invitations
Hallmark and their free e-cards. Who hasn't sent one?
Kodak Gallery where you can create your Online Photo Album
MasterCard "priceless" campaign has become Viral with local humor in every country. Some of which fall into the X category.

The ones that did not work. well those are A LOT.

Nowadays there is even a Viral + Buzz Association and they even have a Mission that you must comply with.

But Viral Marketing is not easy. No wonder I only found one person to have written about it in the last 5 years.

Enrique Gonzalez Nieto

"Embrace and manage online and offline as one
to become a complete Marketing Manager"

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