Recently by Mahalakshmi

In a previous post I talked about the characteristics of Viral Marketing. You may recall there were 6 R's for any marketing campaign to be successful - Replication, Reach, Regular audience, Resilience, Reliance and Response.

This meant that as a company indulging in Viral marketing one has to have an idea which spreads far and wide, to people who really want to know and get excited about it. It has to be genuine and open to comments and feedback. The Viral marketing idea being called the "seed".

How does one seed the viral marketing idea? And where does one go to seed it? If we look at the evolution of the net it took the following paths ...

1) Long ago there was the concept of e-mail which enabled users of a particular organisation to write into each other.

2) Then we got into world wide web where hotmail or yahoo enabled conversations between people who did not belong to the same organisation but could register with these platforms and exchange information. Therein evolved "User Groups".

3)Then came along Google which revolutionised the web by providing large storage space and exchange of pictoral content as an option. Orkut became an instant rage with chats and profiles dominating mailing ... oh so passé!

4) Orkut has been replaced by our addiction to our Facebook, Linkedin and YouTube in that for everything one wants to do one instinctively reaches to these platforms. Statistics show that Facebook is almost as big as Google in page views. YouTube is double in page views. Facebook adds 100,000 to 250,000 new viewers each day. There we have the audience who will hear, listen and respond. There followed the usual players in Twitter, or Digg for creating your own video.

The above are the known ones. Squidoo is another great option. Some marketers swear by it for driving in the traffic. HubPages is a good option too.

My next posting will be about Web 2.0 and using social marketing as a medium for winning business. Stay tuned ...

Image courtesy of: Brajeshwar

In a recent post I introduced the concept of Viral Marketing ...

Just a quick recap: Viral marketing is an online tool which plants the seed of an idea, product or service which later on spreads virally through social networks.

I have intentionally chosen to use the word seed. In fact the terminology for beginning a viral marketing is also called seeding. If we want to create a viral effect of spreading the idea, we begin with a hot Idea. Most people have the questions as where do we go to post our content? Who will follow us on this idea and how do we create the viral effect?

A seed idea which is a corollary to a "meme" has to have the 6 "R" characteristics which I call it the 6Rs ...

• Replication ability: It has to have an inherent quality of being able to copy itself and fast. Something on the lines of the latest fashion trends in the physical world, a seed idea has to become a rage online.

• Reach: This will address your million dollar question how do I make people follow me? There has to be an analysis the social platforms you are currently using and your strategy. Does a You Tube upload create more excitement or do you create a blog which receives rave comments? The idea has to start spreading instantly.

• Regular audience: This is your own on-line popularity chart counter! How many of your friends, relatives and colleagues are a member of your social community online and how many of them like you enough to spread the message?

• Resilience: The idea has to have some type of resilience to be a continued discussion point. It cannot have a short life span. It has to tease, excite and provoke people to talk about it.

• Reliance: Since the whole concept of viral marketing is on the basis of social networks, we need to rely on the source and the seed idea. The originator has to have a reliability factor which encourages the people to move this idea forward.

• Response: Nothing makes an idea more popular than feedback. The more conversations and the more the arguments the better. At least there is enough interest created around the seed to grow it.

Happy seeding!

Image courtesy of: robpatrick

As friend of mine recently pointed out that the oldest viral marketing meme was a "yawn". A yawn is an expression, transmitting itself, that is contagious in spreading and does so with great rapidity.

Marketers true to their profession immediately caught on to this "virus" ... and thus emerged "viral marketing". In the marketing world we therefore speak of ideas "going viral", infecting a host, or many hosts and then being transmitted to others. Viral marketing is a strategy by which a marketer creates a campaign focused around the goal of causing viewers of that promotion to spontaneously spread it by sending it to friends. Some examples of viral marketing include: chain letters, viral video campaigns (the popularity of YouTube is incredible), and on line opinion polls.

All the above examples of viral marketing are quite simple and relatively easy to understand. People not only participate in the above but also talk about it to others urging them, and influencing them to participate which is the success of viral marketing.
While the original marketer has sent forth the virus of the idea or the theme, the spreading really begins when unrelated people across the globe, start talking about it and using this theme for coffee conversations.

Image courtesy of: Tambako the Jaguar

Why is it that a sure shot way of spreading information by word of mouth is telling a bunch of people something and asking them not to pass it on? Why is it that bad news always travels faster than good news? It is amazing the way in which information on an office affair or someone getting a divorce is more spoken about than, let's say, a promotion or an engagement. We get a vicarious sense of pleasure in knowing something and immediately telling it to others. Makes you wonder why?

The secret of this is there is an inherent quality of "wanting to talk about" certain things like rumors and gossip. This idea is known as the meme (pronounced /mi?m/ - like theme). This is the basis of viral marketing.

Richard Dawkins defined meme as a "unit of cultural inheritance". These are ideas that spread from person to person, ideas like jokes, fashion trends, urban legends, folk sayings and of course gossip.

As we are all becoming more addicted to the web and spending more time on e-mails, research, chat rooms, downloads, uploads, and tweeters, we have discovered that the web can be our soul partner to express what we want and when we want it. The best part is that so many people are "listening" and respond immediately! The fact remains that people we have told the information to, are sharing it with their own network of friends and peers. The feel good factor on receiving a response is the second trigger, which sets us off on searching and creating new information which we wish to share with the world.

More on viral marketing in the coming days ... but in the meantime please feel free to forward this on to anyone who may find it interesting!

Image courtesy of: Raquel Camargo