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4) Orkut has been replaced by our addiction to our Facebook, Linkedin and YouTube in that for everything one wants to do one instinctively reaches to these platforms.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
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