Sure Shot Viral Marketing

As I work on a proposal on how to create a viral marketing strategy for Innocentive which brings solvers and seekers together for a mutually beneficial knowledge transaction in the areas of chemical, physical, biological and business solutions, I thought of distilling all that is known and all that has been said and here are my conclusions.

1. If viral marketing is an after thought to your communication strategy, you are better of not doing it. It requires right rigour to develop and execute any successful viral marketing campaign.

2. Viral marketing is the most cost effective way to generate trials and penetration.

3. But make sure that you have something really really good to sell since a bad product/site would bring bad publicity quite fast before you could rework and improve your product.

4. It is intuitive and it would work if you could keep it simple and easy to execute.

5. It must offer something free which is worthwhile for people to feel motivated to spread it. Its critical to know no one is philanthropic to something which might create wealth for others as in business. The offer of something free should be hassle free and ideally not linked to spending money to get it. Most of the times offers of discount aren't forwarded since its seen as a ploy to make people buy something not that valuable. If you believed your product is worth something, why offer discount?

Offering something worthy free to spread you message is the critical component to any successful viral marketing campaign.

6. Creat a fun, interactive, creative, useful, missionary component is the advertisement you want to spread. These are the things that are generally shared by one with his near and dear ones, collegues, friends.

7. Be truthful. Never over promise and under deliver, if at all, just do the reverse. This will ensure that no will be disappointed and creat a bad vibration for your product/site.

Hotmail is acknowledged to be one of the most successful example of viral marketing and it reflected each of the points articulated above.

I work in the technical function but work closely with marketing and brand development colleagues and I believe it helps me with unique perspective to understand how brand communications get translated into enhancement in SOVs and real sales.

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