askerdx asked:

Then again, viral marketing can be screwed up in English too…
As part of a cross promotion with the NBC TV show The Apprentice, GM launches a contest to promote its Chevy Tahoe SUV. At Chevyapprentice.com, viewers are given video and music clips with which to create their own 30-second commercials.

Among the new Tahoe ads that soon proliferate across the Web are ones with taglines like “Yesterday’s technology today” and “Global warming isn’t a pretty SUV ad – it’s a frightening reality.”

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LSpencer asked:

Hello. I was asked today what is the difference between UCC Marketing and PCC Viral Marketing. I know UCC Marketing is User Created Content, but I have no clue what PCC is (although I know there is PPC – Pay Per Click – marketing, but that’s hardly connected to viral…).

Can anyone help me on this one?

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What is viral marketing? It is an idea that is passed through the community much like a common cold. What is viral marketing? It encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others. Viral marketing is a fancy term for word of mouth advertising it is any advertising that propagates itself the way viruses do.

Word of mouth is still one of the most effective marketing techniques, online or offline.As a result viral marketing is a phenomenon that occurs when the creative message you’re trying to convey resonates deeply with the audience you’re speaking to. If you’re doing your homework and adequately planning the right messaging, with some incentive that clearly benefits the consumer, then viral marketing occurs.Consequently it is considered as one of the most powerful methods of online marketing and advertising today.

This form of marketing is dependent on peers passing the information on to multiple others via online social networks. When executed well a viral campaign should spread rapidly and become referenced and talked about across multiple internet channels.

It is most powerful when it taps into the breadth of its customers’ weak connections to others. Therefore tapping the customer’s entire address book is obviously of more value than just reaching their best friend. Ultimately it is the way that ideas have always spread through communities If something has value then people want to share it.

These methods work when the product is something of value so efforts towards design, usability, and solving pain is most of the solution.It then becomes two efforts, creating the conventions from web 1.0 that people expect, share with a friend is an example and the unique web 2.0 strategies that are more social, using rss/blogs, etc.

Viral marketing creates a win/win situation for all parties. The user is provided a service or valuable information for free and in turn provides your site with free advertising.It is so successful because it creates the curiosity and desire needed to generate the demand for a product or service. It causes people to seek it out.

Hotmail used this form of marketing in a small way that produced big results. At the bottom of each of the emails sent, they included a small line that said something like “get your free email account with hotmail. Hotmail is now one of the biggest free web-based email providers, and one of the longest running alongside yahoo and a few others.

Ultimately hotmail piggybacked on personal emails from one person to another to publicize their free email service. At a time when few people had email,the first and only free email service in the marketplace was appealing and novel – hence their rapid adoption and spread.

Viral marketing existed way before ‘viral marketing’ if you were a marketer, I’d say it was doing your job. As it takes advantage of the millions of communities that all of us have built up naturally,that’s you and me .In reality it has been around forever, spreading the word through word-of-mouth was the world’s first form of viral marketing.

It will yield its best results if a valuable and tangible incentive is offered, that will entice individuals to forward an email message to their friends.However,marketers should limit the incentive to a specific quantity to avoid spam-like distribution of the message.

Viral marketing essentially relies on other people to get involved. You can learn the ways to help motivate them and can feed them the information and campaigns that are mostly likely to spark their interest, but ultimately you have no control over what they do with it.

Viral marketing still has the strongest effect if your product can be somehow incorporated into the communication between two people. This includes phone systems (mci), electronic postcards (blue mountain), free e-mail (hotmail), and the communications tool that someone is inventing in his or her garage as you’re reading this chapter.

It is always as effective as others say it is if only it would be done properly. It is effective, yes.However it does depend on a high pass-along rate from person to person.If a large percentage of recipients forward something to a large number of friends, the overall growth snowballs very quickly.

Viral marketing extends this into the digital domain by harnessing the electronic connectivity of individuals to spread your message. It describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message’s exposure and influence.

Like viruses, such strategies take advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to thousands, to millions. Viral marketing is similar in nature to a contagious disease, in the way it spreads. However, it’s always beneficial to the business conducting the campaign.

Essentially it works best in combination with e-mail marketing, since e-mail marketing provides viral marketing with a great communication medium. You can use e-mail to spread the message as really it is a good bit about winning hearts and minds. Viral marketing is advertising that you voluntarily pass around because it’s cool, not necessarily because you want to help build publicity.

There is some noticeable overlap where a guerrilla ad that doesn’t quite look like an ad is so great that you end up telling other people about it.A notable survey was done recently on such an add and it showed a full 70% of people interviewed remembered seeing the ad so viral marketing if done right is incredibly powerful stuff.

It is creating an awareness of a product or a service, without really advertising it. For instance, you wear branded jeans with the name tag on the back.Therefore viral marketing helps to spread the word and can help produce a result.

Also it facilitates and encourages people to pass along a message voluntarily. Viral marketing is essentially the word-of-mouth or refer-a-friend tactic done through the internet. The concept is actually very simple: promote your brand, product or service by creating a message that is intriguing and entertaining enough that people would want to pass it to their friends online.

Viral Marketing is but one of many techniques that together have a cumulative effect in attracting customers and subscribers to your business – in attracting targeted visitors to your website. Momentum is gained by aiming every element of the overall strategy at developing the relationship with your visitors.

It has been able to successfully allow marketers to increase the value of free services online, because referrals are the major way that most people market with free services. So, these tools of internet marketing have been able to allow people to significantly pursue various affiliate programs in order to increase the value of these free services.

Viral marketing campaigns can achieve great success they just have to be planned out like any other marketing campaign. Undeniably it is considered as one of the most powerful methods of internet marketing and advertising today.

Viral marketing has become a popular means of advertising and marketing because they are relatively low cost. To avoid being tagged as spam mail,it counts on the eagerness of one person to pass on the product. Clear market evidence shows it is doing it’s job on the consumers, it keeps them on-line and now with domino pizza, consumers are buying products just to get more marketing, a never ending cycle.

What ever happened to letting anticipation build just waiting for some movie to come out, that carrot in front of you face has gotten bigger and your wallet is getting smaller. It was huge in the mid-90’s before the dot-com bubble burst and everyone realized that eyeballs didn’t necessarily translate into dollars.

However Viral marketing if done right can be a cost effective way to get the word out about your business and get customers buying.Although it’s fair to say that alot of people talk about viral marketing,but they don’t do it very well. It also describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the messages exposure and influence.

Like viruses, such strategies take advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message from one to two to thousands , to millions.One of it’s major strengths is it uses the power of one customer’s recommendation to another.Therefore that helps to spread the word about a product or company.As viral marketing is a method of encouraging recipients to pass along the marketing message to other potential consumers. The impact of video email and the quality of the information presented can facilitate the proliferation of this form of personalized marketing.

Blogging started really taking off after the dot-com boom and bust. It started taking off after world-com and other corporate scandals. Blogs and other social software rely upon the trust of the reader, which is why links, references and disclaimers feature on many (not all) posts.

Transparency is key in the modern advertising-savvy marketplace.Blogs and the blogosphere in general have become an important tool in the viral marketing frontier. Many reputable bloggers are approached by companies wanting to advertise their services or products, all with the intuitive of instigating a viral effect.

Viral marketing is not only putting yourself out there with some free information, but its utilizing the

coolness factor by getting people to write about you and spread the word .It is beneficial in that it has the potential to reach large audiences very quickly meaning companies will potentially get their message to their target audience and beyond in hours. Viral marketing is a great tactic to earn revenue when promoting a product or service .

Article marketing is no doubt is an indispensable tool in internet marketing.There are many people who find writing articles to be dreadful, others may feel it is just too much work and or no one reads them. Article marketing is a process of writing meaty articles and submitting them to article directories on the Internet with the goal of getting traffic and get traffic you will if you do it right.

Viral marketing is the ethical means of driving more traffic to your website. Most of these techniques are free to implement although such will require hard work and commitment. However be very aware that it is a sophisticated strategy that requires considerable thought .

Essentially it is the technical term for what is commonly known as word-of-mouth advertising. Although viral marketing is as old as human civilization itself, the internet has brought its efficacy and reach to a new level, and the technologies that provide the motive force behind this movement continue to evolve.

Personally, if I’d been busted for being a poser and poorly imitating youth pop culture i would avoid using phrases like – Busted. I think pop culture and viral marketing have a lot in common as they are both engaging, creative, and unfortunately in the most part largely misunderstood.

I certainly feel word-of-mouth and viral marketing are one of the best ways to advertise a product to consumers as i feel it’s honest and really gives consumers the perspective from an unbiased individual.

Again, I stress that this is a legitimate marketing tactic which can achieve fantastic results if it is done correctly.As internet marketing is extremely competitive you should use all the avenues that are available to you in advertising your web site and products.

Experiment with the various ways of viral marketing until you find the ones that work best for you. Internet competition is a ruthless and competitive rivalry that shows no mercy.Therefore every means and methods of internet marketing should be used and employed.

By: Douglas Stuart

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One of the most vital aspects of this recent marketing concept which every business owner should be aware of is that it’s completely free. With the right idea, intuition and planning; viral marketing on social networking websites can return thousands of client prospects to any business website.

Social networking website, as the name suggests, are networks of people and friends who use the Internet to communicate, socialise and share, all through one website. Common websites of this nature are Myspace, Facebook, Bebo and many others.

These websites can be utilized through viral marketing methods; that is the concept of providing marketing material which propagates itself to many other people by giving an incentive for this to occur. For today’s Internet audience this incentive is usually interesting, entertaining and more commonly, not related to the business involved.

This may sound confusing but it’s the system of these networking websites which allows this technique to become effective. For example if a business finds a video which could become popular. If this video is interesting, entertaining or both, it will entice viewers to pass it onto their friends to share it. By adding your website link or marketing message into that video as a footer, or maybe adding your URL to the video description, your business details are being passed wherever the video is sent. This is what makes viral marketing on social networking websites so powerful for businesses of any size.

One important factor must always be taken into account for successful viral marketing and that’s to not flood the media with your material. Journalists, the media and members of the public will value your contributions much more if every one of them has a sense of strong content and a good angle. Distributing viral releases or PR as much as you can will result in people devaluing your presence if the content isn’t worthwhile.

Some websites such as Myspace also offer profiles which can be used to the same effect. Making a profile for your business allows you to add people all over the world as friends, who can see your profile and therefore any marketing message you choose to present. However an interesting, unique angle is often required to make the most effective use of this method. For example using an interesting, make-believe character as the profile owner or offering another, more attention-grabbing incentive for visiting your website.

Should you get professional assistance with social networking campaigns? That’s the question many businesses will ask. Managing director of SCD Marketing Scott Chapman explains:

“One of the great benefits of viral marketing on social networks and anywhere else is that it’s 100% free and can provide fantastic results. Good marketing agencies do have the Public Relations and marketing knowledge to get the right angle for your material, which will result in the most publicity. Whether a person chooses management for their viral campaigns depends on the situation they are in but if the budget is there then I’d certainly recommend looking into it.”



By: SCD Marketing

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Viral marketing strategies are becoming implemented more as we’ve come to know more about it’s power to propel a business faster. Viral marketing has really taken off in the last couple of years and with it, so have many of the viral marketing examples and strategies in which people are utilizing. In the course of just the last year we have seen some amazing software products and several programs in which to spread your viral marketing campaign farther.

In any viral marketing campaign, there are certain things that a person or company has to keep in mind. For one thing, behind every campaign there has to be some type of gain or incentive for the person to want to pass the message on. Campaigns that don’t really give back to the sending party, most likely won’t benefit from viral marketing advantages.

For example, if we are speaking of cases of viral marketing for list building, many viral marketers have taken to using tell-a-friend forms. But, regular tell-a-friend forms are not usually enough to give a person the needed incentive to push a campaign along. It’s for this reason we started seeing products such as Viral Friend Generator come into play. With Viral Friend Generator, we seen that by adding a third step to the process, we could add a bonus of some type to the sending party. Prior to this, regular tell-a-friend forms weren’t really hitting the mark.

In some cases of viral marketing it doesn’t always need an incentive such as material goods to be effective though. In fact, the most successful viral campaigns are the ones that are created with emotion being involved. People that have been touched either by compassion, laughter, or shock are usually the most effective. If a person can have some type of profound experience by receiving a message this can spark a huge viral campaign. We don’t have to look very far to find campaigns of this type online. With the advent of video being used so much in marketing these days, it has completely impacted the way in which viral campaigns are developing.

Blogs are becoming much more viral friendly as well. Some of the Wordpress plug-ins that have been developed for boosting people’s posts in many of the Social Bookmarking sites, or RSS submission services are really getting amazing. It’s so great to see some of the technology that’s coming out with helping in viral marketing. But, remember to use some of these plug-ins you do need to have a Wordpress blog hosted on your own hosting account. Otherwise, most aren’t created for use with such blogs created on Blogger or on Wordpress’s own servers.

There are a few very good products and strategies that have come to very good use for marketing viral. Definitely one of my favorite outlets these days for re-branding and creating my own versions of viral marketing software came with a membership I got with the guys at IMBuzz softwares. Each month I get a brand new one, and each of these has always been of very good quality. It’s one of the best memberships I think I’ve ever been a part of. Since I’m in the viral marketing niche, these softwares suited my business like a glove with some key advantages for viral marketing! I’m also a huge fan of Viral Spiral. It’s helped a very good friend of mine and myself to create a good sized mailing list, and also provided a place to help people along with their online marketing careers. It’s great to be able to do this virally, plus help people at the same time.

If you have ever been interested in implementing what is now available to you with viral marketing, there really couldn’t be a better time than now. We are living in a perfect time with access to some very powerful platforms and programs to help with your viral marketing campaigns.

By: Davin Ogden

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