Viral Marketing: The Tidal Force of Modern Economy

Viral, or word of mouth, marketing is probably the most powerful force available to business entities looking to increase the exposure of their products and services. While it is relatively strong even when applied physically, and thus being limited in the rate and extent of its spreading by the transportation and communication means available to people living in a certain geographical area, the Internet multiplies this strength exponentially by allowing the immediate spread of the viral message across the entire world in a matter of seconds.
The biggest advantage of social network marketing is the elimination of the need of the marketer to do all the work to spread the message. Once the message has been delivered to an online social network, it continues to spread through the efforts of interested individuals who attract to it the attention of their family, friends, acquaintances, and business associates. These, in turn, are likely to continue spreading the message through their own network of contacts.

Unlike physical word-of-mouth, where information is passed on demand in most cases, an online social networking site creates a possibility of the message being passed on indiscriminately to all of the certain user's network of contacts, which in turn creates a possibility for message dilution. While not as severe as with television or radio advertising, for example, message dilution in this case still reduces the effectiveness of a marketing campaign and reduces its ROI. Steps can be taken to concentrate the message. One such step is to join a group, or groups, on a certain social networking site, which are devoted to a specific subject, product, or service associated with what the business entity wishes to market. It could be either a group encompassing a wide range of products (for example, mobile phones) or a narrow, manufacturer-based range of products (for example, only mobile phones manufactured by LG). Presumably, members of such a group would be only people interested in this specific product or service, and thus potentially more receptive to the entrepreneurial message than the general population of a particular virtual community at large.

If the marketer cannot find a group that fits its message, the majority of social networking sites offer the functionality for the users to create a group, so the marketer can follow this path while extending an invitation to join the group to other members of the community. Again, the initial invitation may be diluted in its effectiveness by some people's disinterest, but this can be limited by delivering the initial invitation only to members of groups that are in some way related to the message the marketer wishes to get across. Either way, the message's effectiveness becomes concentrated quickly in later stages, when it is delivered only to individuals who have joined the newly created group. Group creation can be further enhanced by adding a company logo to the user profile in those cases when the marketer is indeed a company rather than an individual.
On the other hand, social networking sites are geared predominantly toward individuals and concentrate on non-commercial interests. This means that a purely mass-market message is unlikely to receive a particularly warm reception from users. In some cases, this could even be counterproductive, as in situations where a marketer is a business entity surrounded by some sort of controversy. In these instances, a possibility exists that a search function for a specific brand name will bring up both the marketer's message and the anti-marketer messages posted by social, labor, environmental, or some other type of activists. In this case, the best way to leverage social networking for the marketing purposes is to concentrate on one single product or service, or on a specific line of products or services, with an emphasis not on the product or service itself, but rather on the benefits it brings to consumers, the environment, or something of the sort.

Social networking sites can be particularly useful if the message that the marketer is delivering falls within the three following categories:
• Emerging products - one of the biggest attractions for practically every social networking community is the novelty of a certain product or service. This is due to the fact that many people joining such networks like to be the first to try a product or service and then to share their experiences with the others. This, in turn, often motivates other people who discover this information to try the product or service themselves and add to the opinions being posted, be it a blog response, a forum posting, or a blog of their own.
• Social cause - while this can be a negative influence for a company, product, or service that are in some ways controversial, it is likely to generate significant positive exposure for a company that supports a certain social cause, or product/service that makes the pursuit of a certain cause possible or more achievable.
• Lifestyle brand - this is the type of brand that helps users create and maintain their online identities. While the overall target audience for this type of products/services may amount to only a fraction of all the users on a particular social networking site, the total numbers still are likely to be considerate if one takes into account the total number of users for these sites. MySpace, for example, boasts a community of over 110 million users, so even 1 percent of this number represents a substantial target audience and potential buyer base for a product that helps users define themselves as distinct individuals or, on the other hand, as part of a bigger group.
Any commercial marketer looking to utilize social networking sites to spread its message must remember that one of the most important features of such sites is interactivity. Users accessing profiles and personal pages of other users will not be satisfied simply with reading messages and viewing images they find there; they would want to comment, criticize, support, or otherwise respond to what they see and/or hear. To keep the interest and generate positive responses from the users, marketers would be well advised to utilize interactive functionalities of a particular social networking site to add such things as quizzes, polls, and contests to their personal page. The additional benefit of polling is the possibility of making adjustments to future marketing campaigns to make them more effective. Another potentially positive development could be the result of encouraging visitors to submit links to Web content that supports or otherwise enhances the marketer's message. After these links are reviewed, the marketer can add them to its personal page, with the credit to a particular user who submitted each of them. This is bound to gratify those users who have already visited the page and increase the likelihood of them visiting it repeatedly in the future. It also has the potential to result in increased traffic, as those people whose links have been published spread the word, and those who want to see their name credited to a submitted links applying more effort in search for relevant content on the Web.