Viral Marketing

Read this editorial in today's Times of India about viral marketing, and it got me interested. I'd already come across this term a couple of times before (on TechCrunch, a blog covering start-ups and cool technology products and services), but hadn't given much thought to exactly what it is. So when I saw the phrase 'viral marketing' in the tag-line of the article, I dived into the full article, to understand what it exactly means. So viral marketing is basically word-of-mouth publicity, albeit on the internet. To quote the article, 

... Viral advertising involves companies or marketers creating messages so funny and interesting that consumers feel compelled to forward them to their friends and family. 

Now word-of-mouth publicity has of course been a very potent tool to market products and services, but the internet takes it all to a whole new level! For one, with the amount of content shared online these days these campaigns reach out to a huge population across geographical boundaries. For instance, I watched the new Microsoft commercials, featuring Gates and Seinfeld on YouTube, even though they are airing on televisions in US (and not in India). Social networking has led to the world shrinking, and sharing of services, applications, has never been so easy! And marketers have of course latched on to this opportunity to use the Web as a marketing tool. The goal is to identify users with high Social Networking Potential (SNP) and create viral messages that appeal to this segment and have a high chance of being passed along. Viral marketing can be in the form of video clips, interactive Flash games, images, or even text messages (SMS). Viral marketing has serious implications for the traditional media of course, with the Internet eating into the ad spend for print and television. To quote some figures from the Times of India article again, Google witnessed a 42 percent jump in revenue in Q1 2008, over the same period in 2007, while a leading American newspaper reported a revenue dip of 9.2 percent. Companies are clearly putting their bets on the World Wide Web!