Viral marketing

[michaelday]

Can somebody explain meaning of the term viral marketing.

Thanks

[Mike_Mackin]

I think that it refers to the "refer a friend" idea you see on many sites.

[mivox]

An example of viral marketing: At the bottom of every 'free email' user's messages is a little blurb about their email service: "Do You Yahoo?" or "Get your free email at Hotmail" or something like that.

People read the email footers, sign up for the service, and suddenly more people are sending out the footers via their new accounts, so more people see it, and more people sign up, etc., etc...

Basically, viral marketing should piggy-back unobtrusively on top of something useful, and 'spread' from there by recruiting new users/members/customers who will spread the piggy-backed message further.

[michaelday]

Thanks guys.

[ettore]

Or, for an in-depth reading about viral marketing, try Seth Godin's free E-book "Unleashing the Ideavirus" from www.ideavirus.com

[Bolotomus]

Is MLM a subset of viral marketing?

[ettore]

bolotomus,

I wouldn't say so. MLM can use viral marketing techniques as well as plain revenue-based ones.

The very idea of viral marketing is that the marketer is not - and ought not to be - at the center of successful marketing: *the customer/final user should be*.

Another good example of viral marketing is ICQ.

[Gary_Snyder]

Other terms to describe viral and multi-level marketing would include "referral-based marketing", and the most common one is... "word-of-mouth".