Viral Marketing

Not surprisingly therefore, a recent marketing technique that is becoming

popular for businesses is viral marketing, “word-of-blog” marketing or “viral buzz”

marketing as it is otherwise known. Viral marketing, as defined by Moore (2003)

as

“the name applied to a group of family resemblant marketing strategies using

network-enhanced word-of-mouth.”

Viral marketing can be used for passing along adverts, animations, photos,

hyperlinked promotions, newsletters, games, press releases, petitions or

whatever else will advertise your business. This type of marketing encourages

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individuals to pass on information that they receive in a hypermedia environment

to friends and acquaintances (Moore, 2003). The way in which data and

information is sent between users in viral marketing creates a chain effect that

spreads the message, or purpose, of the sent content onto the next user, and

therefore the cycle continues onto the user after that. As Mohammed and Fisher

(2003) suggest, viral marketing generates a ‘buzz’ around a product or service,

created by user-to-user recommendation. It has been noted by Mohammed et al

(2003), that users are more likely to trust recommendations made by friends or

acquaintances on a product or service, rather than the company themselves.

This is one reason why products that are part of a viral marketing campaign tend

to ‘take off’ in popularity very quickly. Evidently, this is the reason that

businesses are now starting to understand the possibilities and opportunities

that viral marketing can create for them.

2.3.1 History

Viral marketing was first recognised in 1997 following the rapid growth of the

email service “Hotmail” through the “invite friends” request. Hotmail is a key

example of how quickly business may become successful using viral marketing,

as Simonsen (2008) states its users grew from 500,000 in 1996 to 12,000,000

users just a year later. The film ‘The Blair Witch Project’ is also considered to be

a pioneer for viral marketing techniques, with its use of the Internet to

communicate ‘leaked’ information to the wider audience (Mohr, 2007). Marketing

in this way had not been seen before on the Internet. Previously, companies

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