whats viral marketing? Does it always work?

Viral ,Marketing has come from Virus the way they spread and effect is great. Say like viral fever !

Similarly Viral Marketing is a marketing technique used by brands to make their products popular and spread awarness about it . This mormaly works with WOM "Word of Mouth" which plays a major role.

Viral Marketing can be dangerous too .. the way it is used with product being good with its attributes and features which decides +ve and -ve impact of viral Marketing .

. It replicates itself
· Its uses its host resources
· It spreads itself to other hosts

whats this got to do with marketing?

But how can a virus help us with marketing? If you apply the same principles as above to a marketing campaign, you get a rather ingenious way of getting your message across – a marketing campaign that:

· Replicates itself – leaflets, posters etc are expensive to reproduce, a viral marketing campaign doesn’t cost any more than the initial set up
· A viral campaign uses the host resources of the user viewing it, i.e., their email inboxes
· It spreads itself, propels itself through cyberspace with very little maintenance from the marketing team.

"People engage in word of mouth because they want to look good," said George Silverman, the author of "The Secrets of Word-of-Mouth Marketing." "Word of mouth is the most honest advertising medium there is. People don't want to hurt their friends and family and colleagues with bad information."

But its some thing that may damage the brand equity if used in a unethical way... still ..its effective for somme who are new to the business .. any thing thats not true but can make a buzz about the product or service can click and be helpfull in getting its self noticed.

Viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of virus or computer viruses. It can be word-of-mouth delivered or enhanced by the network effects of the Internet. Viral promotions may take the form of video clips, interactive Flash games, advergames, ebooks, brandable software, images, or even text messages.