1) Wikipedia Article on Viral Marketing
This was the typical Wikipedia text, kind of boring. It said viral marketing is a marketing technique that uses pre-existing social networking serves to increase brand awareness or achieve other marketing objectives through self-replicating viral processes. Wow, that’s a mouthful. So the main point to get from that is, something spreads like a virus. Ads are paid by sponsor companies and are launched either on their own platform or on other social media websites. Viral marketing can take form as video clips, interactive flash games, advergames, ebooks, brandable software, text messages or web pages. The goal is to create viral messages that appeal to individuals with high social network potential. Messengers can be market mavens, social hubs and salespeople. It is important that the message that is being sent is memorable and sufficiently interesting. There are three principles that apply when using viral marketing, social profile gathering, proximity market analysis, real-time key word density analysis. . I didn’t really understand what viral marketing is after reading this text but after I went through the other texts, everything started making more sense to me.
2) Viral Marketing 101-Seeding your Company
Viral marketing is like seeding, you put your creation into the right mediums so that it gets picked up and distributed around the social web. There are certain things a campaign should do to be successful at viral marketing: 1) deliver humor, 2) give someone an ego boost, 3) be incredible useful, 4) cause controversy, 5) play on a meme, 6) be dramatic, 7) be provocative, 8) evoke a smile and 9) spark an emotional engagement of some sort. The goal is to appeal to the audience so they share it. When a viral campaign gets started, it usually uses already exciting communities as a leverage. You can say that viral marketing almost always follows a specific set of rules and if you have does down, the marketing will most likely be successful.
For me, this text was way more interesting and I started to understand what viral marketing is and how it is done.
3) 15 of the Viral Marketing Campaigns
This website was interesting because there were real examples of things that have gone viral. There are explanations provided on why these specific things went viral. A certain thing goes viral, when essentially a pitch or it is created which is cool and interesting enough that consumers will spread it on their own. Sometimes viral marketing is created and meant to go viral, other times it just happens on its own. I thought it was really interesting to see what kind of things have gone viral and why. Some things, I would have guessed that they would go viral. For example the Kobe Bryant jumps, Google mail and the Obama care were all things that I personally might have shared if it popped up on my Facebook wall or on my twitter. Other examples seemed weird to me and I was somewhat surprised that is went viral. For example “Will it blend?”, they a iPhone was put in a mixer to see if it would blend. I honestly don’t know why someone would share that, I probably wouldn’t but I guess it could be pretty funny to some people.
4) 7 Tricks to Viral Marketing
I thought this website/text was cool, because it gave you step-by-step instructions how to create a viral marketing campaign. . The main goal is to spend nothing and let fans do the work.
I mentioned earlier that one text said that viral marketing follows a specific set of rules and I am guessing these are the rules.
1) Make people feel something. You have to create very strong emotions because viral marketing is 100% about emotions.
2) Do something unexpected. People notice it when you do something different.
3) Do not try to make ads (that suck). It’s all about a good story and just add your product into the mix, but the product isn’t the most important thing.
4) Make sequels. Make extra movies similar in concept, make behind the scenes look, make bloopers, make a blog about the process and make extra materials. You never should let people standing with nothing.
5) Allow sharing, downloading and embedding. This is basically what viral marketing is all about.
6) Connect with comments. You have to accept all opinions because controversy is a major way of starting a viral marketing campaign.
7) Never restrict access. This kind of goes hand and hand with number 5). It is all about the campaign getting life on its own so it needs to be free.
5) Viral Marketing , Meet Social Media
Marketing through social media seems to be the big new form of viral marketing. Makes sense to me. I see all kinds of ads and videos on my twitter and facebook. I usually watch them but only share some. Usually I share the ones that convey a good message or are just hilarious to me.
The producers of “Mystery Science Theater” started the whole viral marketing thing in the 1990s. I have never heard of them but I guess they realized right away that their form of marketing was really successful. BMW also was one of the first companies to use viral marketing. They made a series of short films which people could watch if they signed up to their website. BMW had 2 million registrations to their website and over 4 years there were over 100 million views.
The author of this text compares viral marketing and social media to Pac-man and Mrs. Pac-man à they have fallen in love and become one. I thought that was a really sweet comparison.
