Viral marketing has become a popular method for large and small firms to advertise their products/services or ideas. One of the main benefits of viral marketing is the fact that it costs almost nothing to implement. This allows smaller companies with large amounts of creativity to create and spread a message about a product or service without having to rely on spending vast amounts of money on an advertising campaign. The catch, however, is that whatever is trying to be made to go viral has to be remarkable. As Tim Ferris points out, you need some kind of hook to get people interested. This could be a remarkable product or idea, something cute or funny, or even a highly bogus claim. It just has to be something that grabs people’s attention and encourages them to spread the word about it to others. The worst response you can receive is that of none at all.
That’s not to say that viral marketing campaigns always succeed. In fact a large majority of them often fail. For example, a web site surfaced two years ago called alliwantforxmasisapsp.com (now defunct) and was supposedly created by a young fan of the PSP and Sony in general. The site featured an older teenager raping in a video about how all he wanted for Christmas was a PSP. Almost immediately, people were suspicious and after a few months Sony admitted that they had created the site and not a fan. They had wanted the video to go viral, but it backfired horribly. It didn’t help either that the video was terrible, annoying, and the rapper looked like he should have moved out of the house long ago. It was also a huge embarrassment to Sony that they had actually created such a poor video and hoped it would go viral.
It’s clear that viral marketing is a powerful tool, and when implemented properly can garner serious benefit to an individual or firm. However, just like anything else on the internet, you risk annoying potential/current customers when viral marketing campaigns are not thought out very well or poor ideas are used.
