Viral Marketing - Another Set of New Clothes for the Emperor?

fingal asks: "I've recently started working for a company who has decided that viral marketing is The Way Forwards. I've got mixed feelings about this. As the sysadmin who has to deal with the aftermath of hosting our own stuff and dealing with the inevitable congestion associated with the (rapidly increasing) size of attachments that are routinely moved about, it just winds me up. On the other hand - I very much enjoy checking out what people are up to (except when they email it to me and I'm on a dial-up...), but I don't think that I've ever actually bought anything as a result. What does everyone think about about this (either from the viewpoint of a consumer, provider or infrastructure engineer)?" Here is a better definition of the term "viral marketing". What are your thoughts on this subject?

Comments

Here's the REAL everything2.com definition

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is a better definition of the term "viral marketing". What are your thoughts on this subject?

Er, you just pointed to the everything2.com homepage. And while that is an example of HOW viral marketing is carried out, I think your primary intent was to point to the everything2 definition, which is here:

http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=605630

Not anymore...

[0x0d0a]

"I've recently started working for a company who has decided that viral marketing is The Way Forwards. I've got mixed feelings about this...

You *may* have just started, but after posting material criticizing your company to Slashdot, I'm dubious that you're going to keep your employment long...

Can we get a 'duh'?

[Violet Null]

Viral marketing is deceptive. It may be effective, but hell, so is just lying.

I mean, you pay people to astroturf your product. To state their "opinion" about it without adding on "Oh, and I work for XYZ corporation," or, "XYZ corporation paid me $10 to post this." Why do they not say these things? Because they know that if they did, no one would take their opinion seriously. Well, if no one would take you seriously, perhaps your message is lacking.

Which seems to usually be the case. Companies that already get good word of mouth don't need to astroturf.

What are you talking about?

[stefanlasiewski]

Huh? You need to clarify the definition.

In my mind, "Viral Marketing" is similar to "word-of-mouth" marketing. It's one of the oldest marketing schemes around.

You promote products to your customers, and then your customers promote the product to their friends via email ("Hey Barbara, I get this newsletter from xxx.com, and I think you'll find it useful), over coffee ("Oh, I found this great new website...", whatever.

It has very little to do with large email attachments. It's all about focusing on a small, tight-knit community who communicates alot, and then exploiting those communication channels. Word of mouth.

My former employeer (A large new-parent oriented website with millions of unique visitors a month) was the queen of viral marketting. They probably had the best word-of-mouth promotion of any site on the planet. Why? Because new parents communicate alot. They NEED information, and want to help out the other new parents as much as possible, and end up promoting the website just like they say "Have you checked out Penelope Leach's new baby book?". Big bang for the marketing buck.

So, in this case, viral marketing was working pretty good, but not good enough, because some of us got laid off a few months ago.

Re:What are you talking about?

[fingal]

It has very little to do with large email attachments. It's all about focusing on a small, tight-knit community who communicates alot, and then exploiting those communication channels. Word of mouth.

I would totally agree with you except in cases when the the incentive to forward the email on to another load of people is the payload of the email (rather than some direct transaction with the company (as you mentioned elsewhere with bribes). If an email forwarded item is going to become self-sustaining then it either has to forward itself (in the case of a software virus) or it has to provide the host with an excuse to pass it on to new folk. The more folk that it can interest, the greater the chances of actually reaching the coverage that it desires. If it "dies" (ie is not forwarded on to anyone else) as soon as it arrives at a person who is not directly interested in the product then it will by definition be less sucessful. Therefore an email that carries an attachment that is entertaining in it's own right will, by definition, provide better dispersion than an item that directly narrows down the target audience to the product.

Now, what I was trying to ask when I posted the story was (and judging from the general posts so far I failed miserably to get my point across) was: Is the creation of marketing material that is so far removed from the target product to become an interesting thing in its own right a valid model for doing business?

Re:Correct link for E2

[DeadSea]

In short, it's the practice of having people post "reviews" or "opinions" into usenet/forums/irc, that are actually paid adverts by the company.

This is very different than what I have known as viral marketing. ICQ did a great job of viral marketing to get their chat client to be the most popular. They did this by having the chat client prompt you to tell all of your friends about it.

Viral marketing is having your product communicate with each of your customers contacts. The viral part of it is that it has exponential growth. As the number of customers grow, the number of messages sent will grow.

This really makes sense for some products such as chat clients that are meant for communication. If you made a fridge that said "Hi, check me out!" whenever somebody new walked into the kitchen, you would have made a fridge with viral marketing. I don't know how much sense that would make given that fridges don't usually communicate and adding viral marketing might increase the costs significantly.

Re:Correct link for E2

[fingal]

Or from the same page:-

Gimmick Promotions
These centre around some kind of novelty, such as an email attachment game, interactive section to the website, 'special offer' requiring you to 'recommend' the email addresses of friends in order to get a discount. In terms of generating traffic these can be the most productive tactics. Many variations on this exist, and chances are you've received or seen some form of it at some time, athough you may not be aware of it.

This is closer to what I was referring to when I posted the original story. Or to put it another way:-

Eventually the attachments got to some exec in advertising who, instead of worrying about their copyright being ripped off, realised that if they could get people to forward their adverts to each other they could save a hell of a lot on airtime and look cool in the bargain without worrying about the censors. Bingo.

My understanding was that once a sucessful viral campaign was under way, it would become self-sustaining thereby opening up the possibility of exposure to a load more eyeballs...

What the Fuck?

[bellings]

I'm assuming this entire incoherent article is just an attempt at a viral advertisement for your website.

Did you get paid to submit it to Slashdot every day until some editor came back from lunch stoned and accepted it, or did your company's marketing department just give up and slip Cliff $100 worth of ditch weed and tijuana hookers to post this trite?