What is Viral Marketing

The term “Viral marketing” refers to how people pass on and share interesting and entertaining content via the internet. Viral commercials often take the form of funny video clips, or interactive Flash games, an advergame, images and even text. It’s been noted that viral marketing is popular because of the ease of executing a marketing campaign, relative low-cost (in comparison to direct mail), excellent and precise targeting that leads to the high and rapid response rate. The main strength of viral marketing is its ability to obtain a large number of interested people at low cost. Through the use of the internet and the effects of e-mail or internet advertising, the business-to-customer efforts have a greater impact than many other tools of marketing.

Viral marketing is a technique that avoids the annoyance of spam mail. This in turn encourages users to tell a friend of a particular product or services, which serves as highly effective word-of mouth advertising.

Researchers are convinced that this concept is a viable and effective marketing tool. There’s proof to backup their claims. Apparently the brain makes decisions in just a 20th of a second of viewing a webpage, confirms a study, published in the journal Behavior and Information. According to statistics, recreational Internet surfing has overtaken television as the largest recreational activity. Apparently, by the end of this year it is estimated that more than 6 billion people will be using the Internet. Note that it took more than 50 years for television to get to this point. It’s certainly an innovative medium that has captured the interest of the person searching for answers behind a PC,and the individual hoping to score with a marketing strategy.

YouTube and other distribution channels
One of the greatest ‘vessels’ of the viral marketing concept is without a doubt YouTube, a popular free video sharing website that utilizes AdobeFlash technology to display video and allows users to upload, view and share video clips.

After one year in business, YouTube was acquired for approximately $1.65 by Google. YouTube is now receiving more traffic than MySpace, CNN.com and Ebay combined. This is certainly a testament to the growth of video and its viral nature. The wide varietyof site content includes movie, television clips and movie videos, as well as amateur content such as video blogging. The company was named TIME magazine’s “Invention of the Year” for 2006.