Viral Marketing - a touch of modern communication

What is viral marketing? How could a term like this be one of the most important techniques of "modern" marketing?

Viral Marketing could be defined as the "marketing phenomenon that facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message."



When talking about viral marketing, people might wonder why that term is being used to defined that kind of process. It might seem quite wierd to hear someone defining himself as a "viral marketing expert", but once you know what the process is about you would probably agree that viral marketing is a good term for defining that strategy.

This technique consists on passing any kind of information to a mass audience in a way that makes them pay more attention to it instead of to any other kind of advertising. If you hear something from a reliable source, you would probably believe it more than from any other source.

In this context, we could say that viral markeiting is a phenomenon that enables a message to get to a wide audience, with the use of social media, for example. You start something, and tomorrow maybe 100 people would know what you started. It is like a virus, it expands.

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There are several techniques, but the best of all of them, for me, is to create a community: You have to realise that one returning visitor is worth more valuable than a unique visitor, not only because you have discovered one follower, but because he will probably talk about you with his colleagues.



What can we understand from this? Isn't this familiar with the antique word of mouth technique? It is the same thing, but in a modern and electronic way. Thanks to telecommunications, viral marketing is much more effective than the old-fashioned word of mouth. The statistics show that:

• Two thirds of the world’s Internet population now visit a social network.
• 220+ million people visit the top 25 social networks each month.
• Facebook alone has 500+ million active users.
• Social Media Internet traffic has exceeded adult entertainment sites.
• Time spent visiting Social media sites now exceeds time spent emailing.
• Consistent polls reflect that 89% of people forward news, events, and vendor specific information to people in their network (mostly on Twitter)
• 59% of adults polled state that they use their cell phone to remain connected with their social network. In fact, I am one of those who use their mobile phone to remain connected to the Internet.

What do we see with this? It cannot be denied that nowadays, putting an ad on social media networks is much more better and gets better results (depending on the target audience you want to reach, of course) than a commercial break on the radio or TV. At least, I spend more hours on the Internet rather than on TV.


So, to sum up, what do you think, is viral marketing going to be the future of advertising?