What is Viral Marketing?

Viral Marketing can be defined as an electronic form of word of mouth marketing. It is sometimes called online viral marketing or buzz marketing [1]. Word of mouth is a marketing technique that encourages people to talk about products and services [2].

Key elements can be seen in viral marketing are

1. Information
2. People
3. Value
4. Go viral
5. Digital Channels

INFORMATION - The information can be about a company, product, news or sharing own views on an issue.

PEOPLE usually have two similarity: like to talk and spend time online regularly.

VALUE - Usually if the information is informational, fun, creative, with incentives or inviting for views tends to attract people’s attention and encourage people to spread, to share and to respond to it.

GO VIRAL - When someone comes across a piece of worthwhile information and spread it to friends/peers on digital channels. These friends/peers continue spreading the information to their friends/peers and so on which this spreading activity is called “go viral”.

DIGITAL CHANNELS - With the popularity of web 2.0 technologies [3], more channels are available and the communications become more dynamic and interactive. People can share text, graphics, videos, photos by emails, mobile applications, social network media and readers can respond online simultaneously.

To companies, viral marketing can be the most powerful marketing tool and deliver some unexpected achievements.

Interested to read how my teammates define viral marketing, please click the Viral Marketing tab on top of the screen or the links below.

Priscilla Poon,
Wallace Fung
Celia Chan
Wallace Cheng

References:

[1] Textbook 1 - Internet Marketing Strategy Implementation and Practice 4th Edition, Chaffey and others, page 556.

[2] www.womma.org

[3] Web 2.0 is a collection of web services that facilitate interaction of web users with a site to create user-generated content and encouraging certain behaviours online such as community or social network participation and user-generated content, mashups, content rating, use of widgets and tagging.

[4] viral marketing model - http://leneberlin.wordpress.com/2008/12/14/viral-marketing/ and edited