About Viral Marketing

So what is all the hype about viral marketing?

Viral marketing or viral advertising are fad words referring to marketing techniques that use pre existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives such as product sales.  Basically, online viral marketing is a 21^st century marketing technique for brand awareness.

What does the terminology actually mean?

Viral marketing was literally coined from the term viral infection because when a person becomes infected they have accepted the idea of the pathogen or put more simply they have become a willing host to the pathological viral state.  It’s much like the placebo effect of virus contamination – you may believe that you will get sick because there are pathogens in the air, however, this is a very misleading thought to adopt, it is the idea that creates the physiological or psychological response.

Science has produced evidence that it is the idea of the person that determines the response of the body.  If you believe in the idea of sickness then your body will respond accordingly.  If however, you believe you do not get sick then your body will not produce the intended sick response.  This is the same concept applied to viral marketing – the person becomes infected with the idea and then further shares or fertilisers other people with the idea “infecting them” and there you have the complete analogy.

As long as each infected user shares the idea with more than one susceptible user on average, the basic reproductive rate is greater than one.  This is the standard epidemiology for qualifying something as an epidemic. In short – the number of infected users grows. And that is viral marketing.

The MMS of successful viral marketing campaigns

There are three fundamentals in order to have a successful viral marketing campaign.  There must be a message, a messenger and a susceptible host (the environment).  The marketing technique of viral marketing relies on pre existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives such as product sales.  However, the marketing techniques for the brand awareness rely on a high pass along rate for the overall success of the campaign, making this key to the overall success of the pathological association and response.