SEM Blog: Website Marketing Blog

What Is Viral Marketing?

Posted by Bryan at March 25th, 2008

Pretty much all of the internet and that little thing attached to it that we call reality are completely infatuated with social networking in one form or another. The rate at which people interact through networks like Myspace, Facebook, and LinkedIn continue to grow on a daily basis. And of course you have to take into account how many blogs, social bookmarking sites (Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us), and forums that people frequent day to day so they can catch a glimpse of how everyone else sees it.

If you stand back and look at the whole picture, what you see is a marketing dream. All it takes is one splash, something to captivate even one individual and spread like a virus through all of their avenues of communication. But unlike conventional marketing, you can’t approach viral marketing as straight forward.

The goal behind viral marketing is for you not to see it as marketing at all. In essence, the product or service being marketed needs to either be so appealing that it can explode onto the scene or you’ll have to attach it to something that already has. From there, your target audience is in the drivers seat and ultimately they’ll be the ones spreading your viral marketing or stopping it in it’s tracks.

Let’s take a look at two examples using a similar strategy:

Mountain Dew Commercial: An already well known product has been attached to a pop culture reference. You know it’s an advertisement, but until the Mountain Dew sign at the end, it’s just another Chuck Norris joke.

Will It Blend?: This is a series of videos dedicated to showing how insanely powerful this device is. Instead of paying for infomercial spots where they blend up a nice smoothie, they’ve torn through everything from an iPhone to GI Joe’s. They’ve cut out the obvious and stepped it up a notch.

Which method is actually the more successful of the two? Will It Blend has become so popular that every new video hits the front page of Digg the day it’s launched. But which of the two products are you more likely to buy? I’d say Mountain Dew.