What is Viral Marketing?

Viral Marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message's to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message's exposure and influence. Like viruses, such strategies take advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to thousands, to millions.

Off the Internet, viral marketing has been referred to as "world-of-mouth," "creating a buzz," "leveraging the media," "network marketing." But on the Internet, for better or worse, it's called "viral marketing."

The strategy may also include video clips, interactive forums, newsletters, ebooks and images accompanied by dedicated test messages.


Elements of a Viral Marketing Strategy

A viral marketing strategy including 6 elements, but the more elements it embraces, the more powerful the results are likely to be. An effective viral mareting strategy:

1. Gives away products or services
2. Provides for effortless transfer to others
3. Scales easily from small to very large
4. Exploits common motivations and behaviors

5. Utilizes existing communication networks
6. Takes advantages of others' resources

Sources:

The Six Simple Principle of Viral Marketing by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson, E-Commerce Consultant
http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt5/viral-principles.htm

Case: McDonald's 24 Hour Star McDelivery

McDonald's promoting its 24-hour home-delivery campaign in Hong Kong, debuting a three-minute commercial, using popular stars as a celebrity like Eason Chan, Joey Yung, etc on TVB commercial with an accompanying push via print, radio, outdoor and online. This immediately drove calls as viewers pursued a special moment with their favourite star. TVB followed the stars to film them zipping through the streets in McDonald's uniforms on McDonald's bikes and capture the surprise and delight of the customers when their special moment arrived. Following each celebrity McDelivery mission, 1-minute segments were aired on TVBJade and McDonald's in-store TV, and shared on Facebook and YouTube. Exclusive extended content could be seen on TVB enterainment news programmes, TVB Weekly and mytvb.com. It is a very successful case using Viral Marketing strategy. Their strategy was to enrich people's lives via a "special McDonald's moment" other than delivering food, the brand can provide a unique experience to add joy and fun to their lives. Branded content was the ideal platform to engage the audiences via an entertaining format.

McDonald's 24-hour Star McDelivery has been referred to as "word-of-mouth", "creating a buzz", and a good peer-to-peer recommendation of its product or service throughout video clips, interactive forums, web banners, newsletters, ebooks and images on the popular websites, like yahoo, msn, mytv, yellow page, Heng Seng Travel Insurance, etc.

Result and Effectiveness:
McDonald's site: more than 2 million monthly vistors, more than 70 million monthly page view visits per user jumped from 1.5 to 9.6 times.
Other sites: more than 133,700 views in tvb.com & YouTube
Delivery Sales boomed after launch to McDonald: Sales up by 104.2%
Awarded by Cannes Lions June 2010 (57th International Advertising Festival): Best use of Television

Sources: Cannes Lions June 2010, YouTube

Advantages of Viral Marketing

The world-of-mouth concept ripples on to peer-to-peer recommendation of the product or service. It also enables the business to generate revenue from local interest in the venture. In McDonald case, most of the web banners posted on the popular website like yahoo, msn, tvb.com and some popular games websites. It can create peer-to-peer recommendation and impression of McDonald 24 hours delivery service.

To promote more businesss transactions of McDonald 24 hours delivery service, it can create high credibility, high efficiency, low cost throughout viral marketing. Such as McDonald receiving the unparallel attention of the massive crowd at a relatively low cost throughout Internet advertisements like web banners, pop-up ads.

And it is probably a way more effective way to create brand awareness and to get the world out to consumers.

Disadvantages of Viral Marketing

Brand Dilution
It depends upon people not versed in your brand to do the "selling" for you. It is important to carefully bring a message that makes your communication brandness.

Association with unknown groups
Viral marketing's strength is its potential to spread exponentially from person to person. During this process, it is possible that the message could wind up in the hands of and passed on by someone who would rather not be associated with. The only way to partially counter this is to ahead of time define an dlimit what information to make available for viral marketing.

Spam Threats
Viral marketing is done poorly, it can lead to large-scale spam issues. Flames may result, leading to damage to the advetiser's reputation. If friend's receiving an unsolicited commercial email can weaken his or her replationship with the person who sent it. This can lead to the recipient of the email dropping a friend and becoming angry with the marketer for sending an unsolicited message. In McDonald case, there are many pop-up ads on the yahoo, msn etc websites. It will lead to the recipient becoming angry and trouble with the marketer for some unsolicited message.