Individual research into viral marketing

Viral marketing is a technique used to spread marketing messages and ads over many different types of social networking sites, it is a promotional method. It is an attempt to spread the marketing message quickly to consumers to raise brand awareness. These messages or ads multiply rapidly and are sent to thousands of people, like virsus'. Examples of these could be: videos, games, E-Books and images. They are online promotional campaigns that spread fast, one minute nobody has heard about it the next everyone has. It depends on a high pass along rate from person to person. If a large percentage of recepiants pass on a message to a large number of friends publicity generate very quickly.

There are different stages within viral marketing which are: 
Buzz Marketing- Creating excitement build up leading to talking in the street. The focus is the talking about promotion. It is an event that generates publicity, excitement and information to the consumer. It is usually something that combines a wacky event or experience that is jaw-dropping e.g tattooing your forehead.
Viral strategies- This is getting your audience to do your marketing for you. The focus is the spreading of your message. this often comes in the form of an email message or a video. 
Word-of mouth- This is the most powerful medium on earth. It is the sharing of oppinion amoungst consumers about a product or service. 

 Some advantages of viral marketing are: they are accessed by millions of people per day, it is a quicker way of reaching potential customers, it saves on advertising costs within the company, you can customize the message to your preference, it can be easily directed to your exact target audience and it can give the company a good reputation. Some disadvantages are: they can be annoying and seen as spam, it only benefits the company if actual sales are made from the advert, they focus on more short term effects, competitors can easily imitate techniques and so steal market from other companies and it can sometimes put negative effect on companies. One of the earliest examples of viral advertising on the internet was Hotmail. When hotmail launched, much of it's early sucess was due to the virality of the sigline which was attatched to every email asking them to join. Another ad was for mentos/coke: These people got famous by making art of the explosions caused by mentos and coke. Mentos handled this well whereas coke did not. Some viral advertising mistakes commonly made are: not making the ad interesting enough to pass it on, failing to provide incentives to encourage people to pass your message along, failing to test and track the results and not recognising it is different from word of mouth marketing. 



This is an example of a sucsessful viral advertising campaign for three. the advert has 9.7m youtube hits to date. This raised publicity through the method of word-of mouth as a large number of people had seen the advert and were talking about this obscure moonwalking pony. 


This is another example of a viral ad promoting pepsi's "Zero calorie cola in disguise". They disguised Jeff Gordon and took a poor unsuspecting car salesman on the test drive of his life. The video has over 43.3 million hits on youtube and there has been various other follow up videos relating to this hilarious video.