viral marketing

2009 Submi ssion : Prof Issac Jacob K J Somaiya Insti tute of Management Studies and Research, Mumbai

[VIRAL MARKETING] Rahul Avasthy PGDM Marketing \u2013 Roll number 08

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Viral Marketing

Principles of Viral Marketing Viral marketing, or "refer-a-friend," email campaigns have received a lot of attention in the media recently. These campaigns, which encourage recipients of promotional emails to forward

At the heart of the issue are concerns over sending unsolicited email, but by using viral beyond their original audience. I admit it. The term "viral marketing" is offensive. Call yourself a Viral Marketer and people will take two steps back. I would. "Do they have a vaccine for that yet?" you wonder. A sinister thing, the simple virus is fraught with doom, not quite dead yet not fully alive, it exists in that nether genre somewhere between disaster movies and horror flicks. But you have to admire the virus. He has a way of living in secrecy until he is so numerous that he wins by sheer weight of numbers. He piggybacks on other hosts and uses their resources to increase his tribe. And in the right environment, he grows exponentially. A virus don't even have

1 11 1111 11111111 1111111111111111 11111111111111111111111111111111 1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111 In a few short generations, a virus population can explode.

Viral Marketing Defined 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





Viral Marketing "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.

The Classic Hotmail.com Example The classic example of viral marketing is Hotmail.com, one of the first free Web-based e- mail services. The strategy is simple: 1. Give away free e- mail addresses and services, 2. Attach a simple tag at the bottom of every free message sent out: "Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com" and, 3. Then stand back while people e- mail to their own network of friends and associates, 4. Who see the message, 5. Sign up for their own free e- mail service, and then 6. 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 extremely rapidly.

Elements of a Viral Marketing Strategy Accept this fact. Some viral marketing strategies work better than others, and few work as well as the simple Hotmail.com strategy. But below are the six basic elements you hope to include in

1. Gives away products or services 2. Provides for effortless transfer to others 3. Scales easily from small to very large 6. Takes advantage of others' resources Let's examine at each of these elements briefly.

1. Gives away valuable products or services "Free" is the most powerful word in a marketer's vocabulary. Most viral marketing programs give away valuable products or services to attract attention. Free e-mail services, free





Viral Marketing generate a groundswell of interest from something free, they know they will profit "soon and for money. Eyeballs bring valuable e- mail addresses, advertising revenue, and e-commerce sales opportunities. Give away something, sell something.

2. Provides for effortless transfer to others Public health nurses offer sage advice at flu season: stay away from people who cough, wash your hands often, and don't touch your eyes, nose, or mouth. Viruses only spread when they're

3. Scales easily from small to very large To spread like wildfire the transmission method must be rapidly scalable from small to very added very quickly or the rapid growth will bog down and die. If the virus multiplies only to kill

4. Exploits common motivations and behaviors Clever viral marketing plans take advantage of common human motivations. What proliferated

winner.

5. Utilizes existing communication networks Most people are social. Nerdy, basement-dwelling computer science grad students are the exception. Social scientists tell us that each person has a network of 8 to 12 people in their close





Viral Marketing of relationships, too. They collect e- mail addresses and favorite website URLs. Affiliate programs exploit such networks, as do permission e-mail lists. Learn to place your message into existing communications between people, and you rapidly multiply its dispersion.

6. Takes advantage of others' resources The most creative viral marketing plans use others' resources to get the word out. Affiliate programs, for example, place text or graphic links on others' websites. Authors who give away readers. Now someone else's newsprint or webpage is relaying your marketing message. Someone else's resources are depleted rather than your own.

Put into practice I grant permission for every reader to reproduce on your website the article you are now reading -- "The Six Simple Principles of Viral Marketing" (see http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt5/viral-principlesclean.htm for an HTML version you can copy). But copy this article ONLY, without any alteration whatsoever. Include the copyr ight

Viral Marketing by Russell Goldsmith

When I first offered this to my readers in February 2000, many took me up on it. Six months later a received a phone call: "I want to speak to the K ing of Viral Marketing!" "Well, I'm not the K ing," I demurred. "I wrote an article about viral marketing a few months ago, but that's all." The Secrets of Word-of-Mouth by George Silverman

"I've searched all over the Internet about viral marketing," he said,Marketing "and your name keeps showing up. You must be the K ing!."

It worked! Even five years later this webpage is ranked #1 for "viral marketing." To one degree or another, all successful viral marketing strategies use most of the six principles outlined above. In the next article in this series, "Viral Marketing Techniques the Typical Business Website Can Deploy Now" (http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt5/viral- deploy.htm), we'll move from theory to practice. But first learn these six foundational principles of viral marketing.





Viral Marketing Why viral marketing fails Ensuring one’s marketing message evokes enough sentiment for it to be passed on and on is a gigantic challenge.

Hotmail owes its success to viral marketing. Sabeer Bhatia, creator of Hotmail.

Sunil George Kuruvilla

It was supposed to be the advertising agency‟s nightmare. After all, who would need an advertising agency when the consumer himself passes the advertising message voluntarily to

Yes, I am talking about viral marketing. First, the basics. Viral marketing uses social networks to create and spread brand awareness. An analogy can be drawn with pathological and computer viruses in the way the viral message passes from one consumer to another. O utside the context of Internet, viral marketing has been referred to as „word -of- mouth‟, „buzz creation‟, „network marketing‟ et al. Twisting Shakespeare‟s words, what is in a nam e? That which we call a virus by any other name would be as nasty. Well, as we will see, there is a lot in a name. A good illustration of viral marketing is the practice of Hotmail to append its own advertisement to every outgoing mail. What it means for Hotmail is that every recipient of a mail would also find an invitation to join Hotmail. Let‟s say one of your friends sends a mail to you from his Hotmail account. You got mail. You read the mail and notice a tiny message at it bottom. The message says, “Get your private, free e - mail at http://www.hotmail.com‟. You click on it. You open the free account. Voila! You got virus! Now, you send a mail to your aunt in New Jersey.







Viral Marketing The emergence of clicktivism as an online version of activism is also a case in point. Through In the Indian context, the presence of clicktivism was appare nt during the recent anti- reservation strike and when strong e- mail „appeals‟ reached a lot of people. So, how can a technique that worked so well for Hotmail and clicktivists fail? Here are the reasons: The name

Shakespeare was wrong. The name „viral marketing‟ is crippling. It has such a negative denotation that cannot be washed away even by a dip in the Ganges. Many experts, obviously enamoured by this innovative marketing tool, have tried to give it a shroud of respectability by

Spam? No thank you, Ma’am.

Those of us who have received innumerable mails explicating about ways to increase our assets will be wary of anything we receive from outside our social network. We are more likely to reach for the Delete button than the Forward button. Spam is the equiva lent of an itch on your back that you can‟t reach. Spam causes many a spasm of anger, and unsolicited messages are Spam. Period. The times, the people

Generation X (anyone born between 1961 and 1981) dominates the consumer landscape today the idea that somebody is using them as vehicles for marketing, then we may all sin g „God save the marketer‟. As Lincoln put it, “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the





Viral Marketing The ‘E’ word

I left it towards the end quite deliberately. Ok, ethics is slightly slippery. Yet, there is a certain hideousness to the act of spreading one‟s advertising message through an unsuspecting customer. So, what if the customer is not king? What if the customer is a donkey? He is still the king of donkeys. And many times, „voluntary‟ is not always voluntary. This is because the consumer doesn‟t suspect that he has fallen victim to the plans of a dexterous marketer.

The latest evidence of a viral marketing campaign gone wrong is Sony‟s attempt to use Youtube to market its Playstation consoles. Sony created a fictitious character called Peter and tried to pass him off as a hip-hop maven. Needless to say, the plan flopped as discerning users soon discovered the scam. In the end, Sony had to make a public apology. That must have hurt. Is that it? Is it time to say goodbye to the virus? Far from it. Like a true, blue virus, we can always expect it to take a mutant form that is more resistant to the vagaries of marketing. Watch this space. Viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce exponential increases in brand awareness, through self-replicating viral

Some of the first recorded offline / online viral campaigns were developed by Tim Nolan of based installation. Phrases like "This city isn't safe" placed along side a URL created curiousity enough in people's minds to remember a URL and visit again once they were online. Viral marketing sometimes refers to Internet-based stealth marketing campaigns, including the





Viral Marketing The hardest task for any company is to acquire and retain a large customer base. Thr ough the use

perspectives found to achieve this customer base is the integrated marketing co mmunication IMC perspective. Types of Viral Marketing Campaigns:

These are few types of Viral Marketing– Pass-along: A message which encourages the user to send the message to others. The crudest form of this is chain letters where a message at the bottom of the e- mail prompts the reader to forward the message Incentivised viral: A reward is offered for either passing a message along or providing

Undercover: A viral message presented as a cool or unusual page, activity, or piece of news, without obvious incitements to link or pass along. In Undercover Marketing, it is not immediately apparent that anything is being marketed "Edgy Gossip/Buzz marketing" ads or messages that create controversy by challenging the borders of taste or appropriateness. Discussion of the resulting controversy can be considered to generate buzz and word of mouth advertising. Prior to releasing a movie, some Hollywood movie stars get married, get divorced, or get arrested, or become involved in some controversy that directs conversational attention to them. User- managed database: Users create and manage their own lists of contacts using a database provided by an online service provider. By inviting other members to participate in





Viral Marketing should cap the incenti ve to a specific quanti ty to avoid spam-like distributi on of the message --

problems. A women's athletic clothing multichannel retailer recently offered a creati ve and socially aware

2. Don't consider the referral an opt-in. When a customer refers a friend, the referral should not

3. Personalize the referral email. Response rates increase dramatically when users can see that a

4. Track and analyze the results. As with any marketi ng campaign, tracking the results and

viral marketing

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