Get your Viral on

Viral marketing is one of today’s fancy tactics and everybody is jumping on the bandwagon to facilitate a buzz around their product or service. There are countless examples of viral marketing floating around on the Internet, many of which are poorly executed, reeks of company executives’ input or attempted marketer’s disguise.

Viral marketing, unfortunately, is a natural progression of the perception (mostly accurate) of a brand in the eyes of the consumer, proliferating among them in a natural way. Fortunately, this does not mean that marketers cannot spark the conversation among consumers in a healthy and accepted manner.

The digital era has enabled us to leverage off the contacts and relationships that we form online. Clever viral marketing tactics often include a “pushed” campaign to a selected few influential and relevant contacts.

Where blogging is concerned it is often easier to identify such relationships. Upon reading a blog post and identifying the recipient to which some of the keywords are linked, one can easily track the conversation (albeit “staged”) and witness viral marketing in action.

I refer to this practice as staged, simply because the initial awareness around the campaign was forced. What happens thereafter is a natural threaded conversation (viral) via a hyperlinked digital sphere. For each blogger that subsequently reference the article in a blog post of his own, a unique audience is addressed. And so the message is able to spread among the blogosphere.

The more the original post is referenced, the more likely consumers will be able to find your material through organic Google searches. (That is smart search engine optimization tactics)

This viral marketing strategy can be employed in various manners through various media channels. The same principle in a “staged” viral marketing campaign can be replicated using Facebook, Youtube, and other social media platforms.

Referral newsletter campaigns also qualify as viral marketing in my opinion. Simply by pushing the campaign to a relevant newsletter recipient database, the consumer has the choice to either ignore or engage in it. Should the consumer engage in it the messages spread via the recipient’s friends and friends of friends. And so the buzz is born.

Staged viral marketing campaigns should always be relevant to the targeted contact, blogger relation or newsletter recipient. It is often witnessed just how easily a campaign can go pear shaped simply because it was driven to an audience with little to zero relevance, who in turn (will) do anything in their power to publicize their outrage.

This video illustrates 15 key elements of viral marketing:

What are some of the best viral campaigns you have seen?

[Image Source: Pandemic Blog]