What is Viral Marketing?
People sometimes ask me, what it is that I’ve learned from 3 years of pursuing Biotechnology – and it’s ‘Viral Marketing’ I reply! (Bad joke. I know!)

But what exactly is Viral Marketing?
Most viruses are known to spread rapidly – and thus a Viral campaign is a campaign which spreads extremely rapidly. From person to person…really rapidly! Have I stressed enough on the rapid factor?

But how exactly can one use the internet to spread something virally?
Well people on the internet just love to share stuff. The cooler stuff you share – the higher you go on the cool quotient ranking of your friends.

(Via: HeavyBagMedia)
“Viral marketing can be an extremely effective form of word of mouth marketing. The process involves crafting a message that is designed to be propagated by its recipients.
One key to success in viral marketing, like other forms of WOM marketing, is to gain access to key influencers within your target audience. Influencers are individuals or groups of individuals who are opinion leaders and trend setters who have the ear of a significant audience.

Once you have identified the influencers in your market, you can craft a message that these influencers will find valuable enough to pass along to the people that they have influence over.”

But how does a company exploit the viral capability of this medium?
Social Networking sites (like: MySpace & Orkut), Social Sharing sites (like: YouTube) and Social Bookmarking sites (like: Digg) have made it relatively easier to reach out to a wide audience.

Let me use the example of a company which makes Blenders. (Mixies / Mixers as we call it in India)
The company I’m talking about is Blendtec.

What did they do?
They made a 50$ investment – created a video and uploaded it on YouTube. And thus started the series of Will It Blend videos.

What kind of videos?
Tom Dickson (CEO of Blendtec) pulverizes all sorts of things using the Blendtec blender. Like here’s a video of an Apple iPod being grinded to dust:

And the other things he’s blended includes Marbles to Grandmom’s false teeth. Light bulbs, baseballs, video cameras etc etc. Have a look at all of their videos here.

What did they want to achieve via this?
"Really our whole intent is brand awareness and market awareness," says Blendtec’s Marketing Director George Wright. "People will remember that there’s a blender that will blend marbles if their blender isn’t blending ice very well."

Blendtec’s Will It Blend videos have commanded more than 40 million views online.

And what has it done for their brand?
In addition to incredible media opportunities (including the Today Show – where Tom Dickson blended an entire rotisserie chicken, bones and all, with a can of Coke.), online sales of the home blender have jumped by a factor of five times, and in-store sales have increased as well.

(Via Marketing Pilgrim)
"Dickson recently showed a CNN clip where two marketing “experts” were debating his YouTube campaign. One of them actually stated that Dickson was foolish to market this way because it was “a lot of work.” He said that if Blendtec wanted to sell blenders, they should just buy an ad in the newspaper. How stupid can one be? As Dickson mentioned, a full page ad in the New York Times could cost well north of $50,000 and likely would generate very few sales.

The scary thing is that these kinds of marketing “experts” are everywhere. They are so incredibly dense that they would want a client to spend millions on an advertising campaign instead of spending around 50$ and taking an afternoon to shoot a homemade video."

In India it’s all about numbers. Recently we met guys from a rather large portal, who after spending tons of money on conventional advertising are finally looking in the non-conventional online space.

Well it’s nice to see people are slowly waking up to the concept of Viral Marketing, but it is disappointing when you hear questions like – How do we measure the success? Can you guarantee numbers?
It’s still all about numbers. No one currently in the market seems to be caring about User Engagement. All they care about is how many registered users they have. ‘Active registered users’ is a figure you’ll rarely see Ad Sales guys of companies reveal.

MP shares 2 simple tips:
1) Be careful when choosing a marketing “expert.”
2) Don’t discount viral marketing.

I’d like to add a couple of more tips:
3) Do not look for short-term ROI and overnight success when it comes to Viral and Blog Marketing.
4) Virally marketing a blog or using a blog for virally marketing a product is pretty risky. Be careful. Talk to professionals.

Here are some other successful Viral Marketing campaigns:

Monk-e-Mail
For CareerBuilder.com. Incredibly funny and definitely worth checking out!

Check out the WATblog message here.

This won the best Viral Marketing campaign at the WebbyAwards.

Snakes On A Plane

An excellent example of a Movie using a viral campaign – to great effect.
You can send a personalized message to your friends in the voice of Samuel L Jackson.

The Webby for the Best Internet Video Viral went to:

The Extreme Diet Coke and Mentos Experiments
See the video here.

- WAT Consult

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