What is 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 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 strategy may also include video clips, interactive forums, newsletters, ebooks and images accompanied by dedicated test messages.


Elements of a Viral Marketing Strategy

A viral marketing strategy including 6 elements, but the more elements it embraces, the more powerful the results are likely to be. An effective viral mareting 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 advantages of others' resources

Sources:

The Six Simple Principle of Viral Marketing by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson, E-Commerce Consultant
http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt5/viral-principles.htm

Advantages of Viral Marketing

The word-of-mouth concept ripples on to peer-to-peer recommendation of the product or service. It also enables the business to generate revenue from local interest in the venture. In McDonald case, most of the web banners posted on the popular website like yahoo, msn, tvb.com and some popular games websites. It can create peer-to-peer recommendation and impression of McDonald 24 hours delivery service.

To promote more businesss transactions of McDonald 24 hours delivery service, it can create high credibility, high efficiency, low cost throughout viral marketing. Such as McDonald receiving the unparallel attention of the massive crowd at a relatively low cost throughout Internet advertisements like web banners, pop-up ads.

And it is probably a way more effective way to create brand awareness and to get the world out to consumers.

Disadvantages of Viral Marketing

Brand Dilution
It depends upon people not versed in your brand to do the "selling" for you. It is important to carefully bring a message that makes your communication brandness.

Association with unknown groups
Viral marketing's strength is its potential to spread exponentially from person to person. During this process, it is possible that the message could wind up in the hands of and passed on by someone who would rather not be associated with. The only way to partially counter this is to ahead of time define an dlimit what information to make available for viral marketing.

Spam Threats
Viral marketing is done poorly, it can lead to large-scale spam issues. Flames may result, leading to damage to the advetiser's reputation. If friend's receiving an unsolicited commercial email can weaken his or her replationship with the person who sent it. This can lead to the recipient of the email dropping a friend and becoming angry with the marketer for sending an unsolicited message. In McDonald case, there are many pop-up ads on the yahoo, msn etc websites. It will lead to the recipient becoming angry and trouble with the marketer for some unsolicited message.

What is 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."

I am using a simple example to explain how viral marketing works effectively.

Consider when you check your email, you see a mail from a friend which is a buy one get one free e-coupon offered by Levi's, you will always open it because of your trusting relationship with your friend. When you choose to forward this message to the other friends, you have already endorsed it and given credibility to Levi's product.

In this way, you become a brand advocate every time you transfer the message to others and the others will do the same to his own social network. Like viruses, the message will be replicated rapidly and reached thousands of people.


Key Points:
1.Viral marketing is a new way to reach your target audience.
2.For viral marketing to work, you must understand what will motivate your target audience to pass on a message to someone with similar interests.
3.Viral marketing is word-of-mouth marketing via a digital platform that can spread exponentially.

Source:"The Six Simple Principles of Viral Marketing" by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson
Source:"Viral Marketing:Get your audience to do your marketing for you" by Russell Goldsmith

Advantages and Disadvantage of Viral Marketing

Taking the example of IKEA Facebook Showroom, the main advantage of using Facebook to create viral marketing buzz is that its message can reach a larger number of Facebook users within seconds in a cost-effective way.

The vital of successful viral marketing is that message are forwarded on to friends, family and social group who know the sender. Unlike junk mail, the receivers are happy to receive and forward any message among their friends. The positive word-of-mouth will allows marketers to tap into the community’s existing networks and spread not only the marketing message but also increase their purchase intention.

The main disadvantage of viral marketing on this case is that IKEA limited their marketing communications within the social networks of Facebook only. I believe some of their target audience or brand loyalists are not in the Facebook networks yet, they definitely miss out the opportunities to reach them.

The other problem is that IKEA cannot control the users’ comment posted at the Facebook, it can be either positive appraisal or negative sentiment about their company.

Source: http://09832994s.blogspot.com

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

What so good about Viral Marketing

In an article written by Ben Bold of Brandrepublic and my own findings, the results of the Cadbury eyebrows dancing TVC can be summarised:

Out of GBP3.7m ad spend to broadcast the TVC in the UK, the TVC received

• Viewing rate over 50% vs last year
• 6 million hits in Youtube worldwide
• Recommended by celebrities such as Kanye West [1], Perez Hilton [2], Stephen Fry [3] and countless netizens
• Partner with mobile operator Orange to offer ringtones and records 125,000 times download in 11 days
• Publicities from BBC news, Brandrepublic and awards
• and for sure there are more which are not covered here
  

We can easily see the power and advantages of viral marketing.

1 Minimise ad avoidance
As the information is passed around among peers and friends, trust exists and people tends to open and to remember what has been seen/heard.

2 High reach
With the web 2.0 and internet technologies, message can be transmitted to a large number of recipients in almost no time.

3 Cost and Time Effective
Because of the viral effect, same amount of budget used in new age media can reach audience in wider span than the traditional media and a lot faster.

4 Reach the unreachable
As the information got pass along and recommended by people with special background and rating, these can attract new segments of potential customers which the company has not considered.

5 Free publicity
If you can create an interesting, breakthrough or creative message, it is possible to get media, bloggers, columnists to comment on your story and reach their readers.

6 Identity product and market expansion opportunities
Again, with the help of web 2.0, communications are more interactive and dynamic. By closely monitoring the communications, you may identify what are the future needs of your customers; how to reach them and the competitive advantages of your competitors.

7 Can be seeding
Viral marketing can be planned. Have a good knowledge of the technologies and netizens’ behaviours, companies can develop creative message to surprise and inspire customers.

Interested to read more, please click the Viral Marketing tab on the top of the screen or visit Priscilla's, Wallace Fung's, Wallace Cheng's and Celia's blogs.

References:
[1] Kayne West is a Grammy award rapper; singer and record producer.
[2] Perez Hilton is an American blogger and TV personality. His blog is known for posts covering gossip items about musicians, actors and celebrities.
[3] Stephen Fry is an English actor, writer, journalist, comedian, television presenter and film director.