Viral+Marketing

=Viral Marketing=

toc

= 1. Introduction =

The way people communicate has changed over the last couple of years. People use social networks to communicate and share things with their friends and relatives. This has made it easier for companies to promote their products or services. One of the ways to promote their products via the internet is called Viral Marketing. Viral marketing is a strategy that is used to encourage people to pass on a marketing message to others. This results in the message being more exposed and the influence will become bigger. Viral marketing is the same as word-of-mouth, but then online. (Wilson, 2012) Viral marketing is different from traditional advertising because it relies on consumers to pass on the message to other people, instead of relying on mass media. (Liu-Thompkins, 2012) The strategy has become very popular over the years, especially because of the growth of social media. This has made it easier for people to share advertisements with their friends and relatives. Research shows that people see over 5000 advertising messages per day. More than 60% of the consumers feel like they are overwhelmed by too many advertisements and more than half of the consumers say they don’t want to buy a product that is promoted too aggressively. Viral marketing usually isn’t aggressive at all. If it’s done right, it is funny or interesting and this is why people don’t get annoyed by it. (Toros & Kalpaklioglu, 2011)

There are a couple of elements of a viral marketing strategy. 1. It’s easily transferred to others 2. It scales from small to very large 3. People will get motivated by it 4. It utilizes communication networks 5. It takes advantage of other’s resources (Wilson, 2012)

Some people see viral marketing more as an art than as a science. This is because the companies don’t have a lot of control over the factors that realize the viral marketing’s outcome. They don’t know if it’s going to be popular. It is all up to the audience. (De Bruyn & Lilien, 2008) There is one area that marketers can control when they want to use viral marketing, the seeding strategy. The seeding strategy is used at the beginning of the viral marketing process. The strategy includes determining how many customers they need to spread the message and what type of customers these should be. These seed customers are very important because they are responsible for spreading the message to other people (Liu-Thompkins, 2012).

=**2. The methods of viral marketing:**=

With the development of social network, viral marketing is growing very fast. However, viral marketing is not only rely on the internet or social media, but also need a specific scheme (UpYourViews.com, 2013). Certainly, viral marketing does not mean only use the vulgar information. Since viral marketing is belongs to marketing, it should be valuable and meaningful. Otherwise, the successful viral marketing can also bring the firms sustainable competitiveness. Kaplan and Haenlein (2011) provided tree basic elements that make the viral marketing work. First one called messenger, there are three specific types of messengers (market mavens, social hubs, and salespeople) should be considered in order to ensure that the ordinary information can be turned into viral information. Market mavens are also called information specialists, these people can be the first to get the market information and sends the information to their social network. Social hubs are people who has a large number of social relations and they can spread the information to different levels of the crowd. Salespeople is an intermediary between market mavens and social hubs, they can translate the professional market information into common information and then send the information to social hubs for further spread. Second part is message, this is a key to the viral marketing. Marketers need to create a memorable and interesting information for the viral transmission. This information cannot be very complicated and sometimes some loose-principled information are very useful. Final one is environment, environment is also very important for the success of viral marketing. Marketers need to understand the local culture and social environment. In the different environments, sometimes a small change will cause very big effect. Without doubt, it is not enough to have these three basic elements, the aim of viral marketing is to introduce the product into the market faster and more efficient. Thus, according to Kardell (2014), there are six principles when marketers want to carry on the viral marketing: First of all, the best way to let other people involved in the marketing is reward. This means that when others spread the message, they may get something in return, and this will make them more willing to spread the message. Certainly, these rewards do not need to be very expensive, and it can be achieved by lottery or other ways. This also can be a win-win model, if they left a deep impression on this information, then marketers can have one more customer. Secondly, the marketing plan cannot be very complex, instead it should be easy to remember and spread. Sometimes, a simple picture and a simple sentence will be a good choice. Thirdly, marketers need to use the existing social media, and these social media must have a large number of users, such as Facebook and YouTube. Fourthly, never be afraid to utilize friends. For marketers, this will be a good resources to spread their messages, because it is easier to communicate with friends. Fifthly, sometimes, everyone could be a little bit greedy, thus, take advantage of these human nature flaws are also a good way to expand the business. When someone knows that he will get some reward, if he spread the messages, they will more likely to do it. Finally, the media marketers use should have the scalability. This means that these messages can be spread in both large campaigns and small campaigns.
 * 1) Incentives.
 * 2) Ease of use.
 * 3) Use what’s out there.
 * 4) Utilize your friends.
 * 5) Exploit motivations.
 * 6) Scalability.

=3. Viral marketing techniques=

There are a lot of different ways to use viral marketing. Each of these techniques are different and it depends on what product is promoted to decide which is the best technique to use. - One of the techniques is called advergaming. This means that they advertise a product by using video games. Consumers can interact with the brands which will increase brand awareness. Research shows that 105 million people have played advergames on the internet. - Another popular technique is blogging. By using blogs consumers can provide information to other consumers. Blogs can reach thousands of people and they play an important role for people who rely on other’s people opinion before they buy a product. - Vlogging is becoming more popular every day. Vlog is a word derived from the words “video” and “blogging”. Videoblogs are an easy and fast way to share your opinion with family, friends, and everyone else who sees a user’s videos. These videos could easily reach hundreds of people. - Everyone has an e-mail address. Therefore, e-mail is a useful way to share articles, videos, etc. with other people. It is also an easy way for companies to reach their consumers directly. - Social networking is one of the most popular viral marketing techniques. People like to share everything via their social network profiles such as twitter and facebook. This can be a good way for companies to get more brand awareness, but it can also have a negative impact if people post bad - reviews about a company on a social network site. - Rate and review sites have also gotten very popular in the last couple of years. These are sites where people write their opinion and evaluations about a product they bought. A lot of people go to these websites before they buy a product, which means these sites are very important for companies. If they have a lot of bad reviews, people won’t buy their products. (Toros & Kalpaklioglu, 2011)

=4. Advantages and disadvantages=

Viral marketing has a lot of benefits compared to traditional advertising. It is cheaper, faster, and it’s a better way of targeting the consumers. (Liu-Thompkins, 2012) Another advantage is that the information can easily be stored on the web, which means it will exist on the internet for a long time. It is also easier to target a specific audience because of the information that is available online. If your target group is teenagers living in New York you can easily use Facebook to find out which people you should contact. (Saleeth, 2010) Even though viral marketing has a lot of advantages, there are also some limitations. It is very difficult to measure the degree of success. On the internet you can get some statistics (for example how many times a video is “shared” on facebook) but there aren’t any figures to get a direct conclusion to see if the viral marketing ad was successful or not. (Hausmann, 2012) Another disadvantage is that viral marketing focuses on short term success so it won’t last long. (Saleeth, 2010) One of the biggest disadvantages is that you can’t control what happens with your viral marketing ad. People can take it the wrong way and create a lot of negativity on the web, which will be picked up by other people. This is how viral marketing can have a negative impact on your product on company. (Safian, 2010) Another disadvantage is that negative comments about a campaign will spread even faster than positive reviews, and they will reach more people. (Saleeth, 2010)

=5. What influences the success of viral marketing?=

People will remember a message if it’s creative and the content is interesting. It should stimulate them to pass on the message to others. Research has shown that sex appeal and humour are successful tactics in viral marketing. (Golan and Zaidner, 2008) It is also important who gets the message. Researchers have found that female and younger consumers are more sensitive to viral messages than male and older consumers. This means they are more likely to pass on the message to others. (Chiu, et al., 2007) There are a lot of different ways to spread messages via the internet: e-mail, discussion groups, social networks, blogs. Viral marketing via e-mail seems to be the most successful one, because it’s the only method that reaches all kinds of groups. (San José-Cabezudo & Camarero-Izquierdo, 2012) A lot of viral marketers try to spread their messages by sending them to their followers on twitter and hoping they will reach other people as well via “retweets”. A retweet means sharing someone’s message with your own followers. Peter Bray invented an application to measure this. The app measures the social authority of a Twitter user by calculating how often their followers “retweet” their tweets, how often they tweet, and how many followers they have. The idea of this app is that if followers retweet a user’s tweet often, this user has influence over his followers. This means the user is probably a valuable follower for the brand to spread their message. So this app can come in useful if a brand wants to see which followers they need to reach on Twitter. After that they can send them private messages and other information to try to get them to pass it on to his or her followers. (Soat, 2013) There are people that don’t believe there is value to spreading messages like this. There needs to be more understanding about the strategy so that people will know with which products and services the strategy works best. This is important because if viral marketing is done wrong it can be counterproductive. (Subramani & Rajagopalan, 2003)

=6. Successful viral marketing ads=

One of the very successful viral marketing campaigns is a commercial by Coca Cola. At a train stop passengers could buy a can of coca cola from a vending machine. An ad popped up: “Go to platform 7. You have 70 seconds to unlock the 007 in you”. The passengers then had to run to the platform, avoid some obstacles, and in the end sing the James Bond tune to win tickets to the new movie Skyfall. Hidden cameras filmed everything and it turned out to be the most shared Youtube ad in October 2012. (McNeal, 2012)

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TNT had a campaign where they put a big red button in the middle of the square. It said: push to add drama and when people pushed the button a whole series of dramatic events happened on the town square. They did this to promote their new movie channel. (Simply Zesty, 2012)

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LG wanted to show people how realistic their monitors were. They put one of their tv screens on the elevator floor and they tricked people in the elevator by making them think the floor was falling down. They taped this and put it online and it became very popular. (Simply Zesty, 2012)

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The two most shared ads of 2013 so far are the Dove Real Beauty Sketches and Evian Baby & Me. The Dove commercial was shared 4,3 million times, and the Evian commercial 3,3 million times. (Viral video chart, 2013)

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If we look at all these ads you can conclude they are all successful because they are original. They are funny and interesting, and this is probably the reason people share them with their friends. The Dove Real Beauty Sketches is different from the other ones. It is a serious ad, but it has an important message. This shows that people also share messages that they find important.

=7. Conclusion=

Viral marketing is very good way to target a large group of people. The main advantage of viral marketing is that it doesn’t cost a lot, because there are no costs for broadcasting it, and if it’s done right it can be very effective. However, it isn’t easy. The advertisement should be really good and it should encourage people to share it with their friends. The ad needs a lot of thought and time. Because of the internet sharing experiences about a brand or product has become a lot easier. Marketing professionals benefit from this situation by spreading their messages from consumer to consumer. This is one of the main advantages of viral marketing: it’s easy because other people do most of the work for you. One of the biggest disadvantages is that marketers can’t control what happens to their ad online. They can’t control the reactions, and if the ad has a negative impact they can’t do anything about it. If you look at some of the most successful ad you notice that almost all of them are funny. So from that can be concluded that people share funny videos a lot. They also share interesting videos with a good message, like the Dove commercial. Marketers should really think about their commercials. They should know what they want to reach with it: if people should find it funny, interesting, etc. Because if viral marketing is done wrong it can have a big impact on the company’s image and sales. To conclude, if viral marketing is done right it can be very successful. However, marketers should be careful because it can also have a negative impact.

=8. References= Chiu, H., Hsieh, Y., Kao, Y. & Lee, M., 2007. The determinants of email receivers' disseminating behaviours on the internet. //Journal of Advertising Research,// Issue 47, pp. 524-534.

De Bruyn, A. & Lilien, G., 2008. A multistage model of word-of-mouth influence through viral marketing. //International Journal of Research in Marketing//, pp. 151-163.

Hausmann, A., 2012. Creating "buzz": opportunities and limitations of social media for arts institutions and their viral marketing. //International Journal of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Marketing ,// pp. 173-182.

Kaplan, A.M., and Haenlein, M. (2011). Two hearts in three-quarter time: How to waltz the Social Media/viral marketing dance. Business Horizons, 54 (3): 253-263

kardell, J. (2013). 6 Principles of Viral Marketing. Available: []. Last accessed 28th Apr. 2014.

Liu-Thompkins, Y., 2012. Seeding Viral Content. //Journal of Advertising Research//, pp. 465-478.

McNeal, M., 2012. The Secret of Viral Success. //Marketing Research,// pp. 11-15.

Safian, R., 2010. The Influence Virus: Our Unlikely Experiment in Social Media. //Fast Company ,// November .Issue 150.

Saleeth, H., 2010. //Advantages and Disadvantages of Viral Marketing.// [Online] Available at: __http://www.tutebox.com/1897/business/advantages-and-disadvantages-of-viral-marketing/__ [Accessed 8 December 2013].

San José-Cabezudo, R. & Camarero-Izquierdo, C., 2012. Determinants of Opening Forwarding E-mail Messages. //Journal of Advertising,// pp. 97-112.

Simply Zesty, 2012. //The 50 Best Viral Campaigns of 2012.// [Online] Available at: __http://www.simplyzesty.com/Blog/Article/December-2012/The-50-Best-Viral-Campaigns-Of-2012__ [Accessed 8 December 2013].

Soat, M., 2013. Share and Share Alike. //Metrics & Analytics//, August , pp. 6-7.

Subramani, M. & Rajagopalan, B., 2003. Knowledge-sharing and influence in online social networks via viral marketing. //Communications of the ACM,// Issue 46, pp. 300-307.

Toros, N. & Kalpaklioglu, N., 2011. Viral Marketing Techniques Within Online Social Network. //Journal of Yasar University//, pp. 4112-4129.

Upyoueviews.com. (2013). Viral Marketing Explained. Available: []. Last accessed 28th Apr. 2014.

Viral video chart, 2013. //Most shared ads of 2013 - so far.// [Online] Available at: __http://viralvideochart.unrulymedia.com/chart_keyword/Most_Shared_Ads_Of_2013_-_So_Far?interval=all_time__ [Accessed 6 December 2013].

Wilson, R., 2012. //The Six Simple Principles of Viral Marketing.// [Online] Available at: __http://webmarketingtoday.com/articles/viral-principles/__ [Accessed 30 November 2013].