Viral Advertising:

Viral Advertising means that a product, service, website etc. is made known through already existing social networks, i.e. people who know and communicate to other people and spread the message to them. The concept is that the marketing efforts start small by making a product known to one or a small number of people. Every of them then passes it along to several people he knows etc. in analogy to a medical or a computer virus which also multiplies in a similar way leading to an exponential growth rate.

The term Viral Advertising or Viral Marketing was actually coined in the mid 90s to describe a marketing campaign invented by Hotmail.com to rapidly expand its customer base. There might have been viral campaigns and similar marketing efforts before but this Hotmail campaign has the reputation to be the first.
What Hotmail did was simple. They just added a link to their “Join Now for Free” page to every email sent by Hotmail users and their number grew from a few hundred to over 20.000 within 2 weeks.

Other examples would be giving away a free ebook with one’s affiliate links and giving every reader the right to pass it along to his friends. Another popular Viral Marketing strategy is to add a “Tell-a-Friend”-button on a website.

The advantages of well done Viral Advertising are immense. To name a few:

• It is cost-effective.

• The response will grow exponentially with time.

• One of the biggest advantages is that the promotion will not be seen as spam, because it was send by a known person.

[Viral comes from Latin virus = poison, sap of plants, slimy liquid;

Advertisement goes back to Latin advertere = to pay attention to]

 

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