Viral 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."

The classic example of viral marketing is hotmail.com, one of the first free Web-based e-mail services. The strategy was simple:

1. Give away free e-mail addresses and services
2. Attach a simple tag at the bottom of every free message sent out
3. Then stand back while people e-mail to their own network of friends and associates who see the message
4. Sign up for their own free e-mail service, and then
5. 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 building up pace until the ripple becomes a wave.

Elements of a Viral Marketing Strategy

Accept this fact. Some viral marketing strategies work better than others, and few work like the simple Hotmail.com strategy. There 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