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Overview
Greetings, my name is Steven Schneiderman, and thank you for
visiting GoingViral.com. I've been in marketing for nearly 20 years, and have worked for companies large and small, across many different industries.
Two of my web sites, Marketing Weapons and
Marketing
Assistance, frequently receive requests for information about viral marketing. As I researched the subject across the Internet, I discovered there was actually very little available about the topic online. Thus this
site was born. It's a free resource for online marketers, and it will be
updated regularly. I invite you to click
here to bookmark this site right now!
Viral marketing is not new. In years past it has been called referral marketing or word-of-mouth marketing. Its goal is to get people to pass your marketing message on to friends, family and peers.
Any good salesman worth his salt understands the basic elements of this form of marketing and demonstrates it when he asks a satisfied customer to pass his business card on to someone who might need his product or service. In this instance, the satisfaction of the initial buyer is the viral agent. When he contacts a friend, he passes the news about the product or service on to his friend. His friend may or may not follow-up to learn more, and may or may not pass the message on to another person. This is viral marketing at its most basic. Simply getting someone to pass your message along to other people.
Referral marketing on the Net can take many forms. Most of the viral campaigns I have seen and developed have a goal of generating web traffic, sales leads, or subscribers. A well-designed campaign may even be effective at converting a small percentage of these new visitors or subscribers into sales, but that is not the overall focus of viral marketing. It's chiefly used as a branding vehicle - to create greater awareness of a company, product or service. The first web-based tool to fully embrace this paradigm was Hotmail, and it was this very service that venture company, Draper Fisher, eventually called viral marketing.
In the pages that follow, we will look at over a dozen different forms of viral marketing, and some of the most popular tools and services available today.
Recommended Reading
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Viral
Marketing has become a buzz word that's used, misused,
abused, and co-opted to cover whatever marketers are trying to
push. In this series of articles, Dr. Ralph Wilson defines viral
marketing, examines the basic theory, displays a variety of
applications of the principles, and gives you some direction on
how you can use viral marketing principles in your own marketing
strategies. Click here
for more information. |
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Unleashing
the Idea Virus by Seth Godin popularized the concept of
viral marketing by giving the ebook away for free. Godin's
approach seeks to maximize the spread of information from
customer to customer. The book provides the expected examples of
successful ideavirus marketing, then develops a recipe for
concocting your own ideaviruses. Click here
for more information. |
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