Monday, December 31, 2007

Principles of Viral Marketing

We can define viral marketing as a strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others and creating the potential for exponential growth in the message's exposure and influence. It was the Harvard school professor Jeffrey F. Rayport, who coined the term viral marketing in December 1996. It is a synonym of word-of-mouth marketing. He used the term for an article which had the title "The Virus of Marketing".

The term viral marketing was later made more popular by the venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) which is based in Menlo Park, California with worldwide affiliate offices and over $4.5 billion in capital commitments. It is well known for funding Hotmail (acquired by Microsoft), Overture (acquired by Yahoo) and Skype that was acquired by eBay. The term viral marketing was used to describe Hotmail's e-mail sending practice of advertising itself in the outgoing mails of its service users.

Following are the main six principles of viral marketing, but do remember that it is not necessary for all the principles to be mandatory followed in any campaign though the more closer it is to these principles, the better.

Give away products or services
Provides for effortless transfer to others
Scales easily from small to very large
Exploits common motivations and behaviors
Utilize existing communication networks
Take advantage of others' resources

Take a look at the original post of "The Six Simple Principles of Viral Marketing" http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt5/viral-principles-clean.htm. It was written by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson, E-Commerce Consultant Web Marketing Today, February 1, 2005 and originally published in 2/1/2000.

Outsource Strategies International (OSI) is a US based company that offers professional yet affordable outsourced services in search engine optimization, search engine marketing, PPC advertisement, to clients in all the US States Canada the UK and Australia.

Labels: PPC Advertising, Search engine marketing, search engine optimization, SEM, SEO, Viral marketing

posted by Outsource Strategies International @ 8:06 PM