The viral marketing conference wound up today in San Francisco and there were some lessons to be learned.

1st big lesson: Viral Marketing is not a science, there is no one way to market virally.

So where does that leave us? Well, with a lot of great marketing ideas worth trying.

As a brief definition, Viral Marketing is the process of creating an effective marketing campaign that is most likely to be adopted and carried on by your current members.

A good example of this is emails. If users like the content of their email, they may pass the content on to their friends and if you are a good viral marketer, the user will pass your brand and possibly advertising message along with that email.

What can you do to encourage others to market for you?

1. Create compelling content. Content that appeals to the widest range of people or to a niche market. Both methods work. Good, useful content will enhance the possibilities of it going viral.
   
   
2. Suggest your members pass on their content. Be clear in your directions to your readers. Include a specific message "Pass on this email to friends" do not leave this to chance.
   
   
3. Make it easy for users to pass on your content. If it is an email, then give brief details as to how to 'forward' a message. If a web site, install a 'refer a friend' free CGI script.

When you create a viral marketing campaign it is important to recognize some of the pro's and con's. One large benefit is that others will bear the cost of marketing. You bear the cost of sending out the original message, but if your user forwards it to another, then they bear the cost. This can be a huge savings. One major downfall, is that you do not control who gets your message. You no longer control the targeting of your message.

The biggest danger of viral marketing is brand dilution. When we send out our Joke of the Day publication, we brand it with our URL in the hopes that a subscriber will forward the whole email to a friend. What tends to happen however is that the joke gets copied and pasted into another email and sent off. Poof, brand was lost.

One can protect their brand by using methods that hardcode your brand into the content. One of the best ways to do this is to attach your brand to graphics, sound files and executable files. Files that can not be easily tampered with.

Creating an effective viral marketing campaign can definitely be a challenge in itself, but if you succeed in hard coding your brand into content that goes viral, the results will be phenomenal.

To your viral success.

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Kevin Needham
A.I.M. Publisher
kevin@inetexchange.com