UnMarketing: Stop Marketing. Start Engaging

Chapter 49. Viral Marketing

VIRAL MARKETING HAS many names. You can have a code name for it called Buzz. It can be WOM, which stands for word of mouth. It can be called pass-along rates. It goes out there and it gets watched. It goes out there and it just goes and grows. It's the art of having other people tell their friends about you.

You can call it whatever you want. Going "viral" is what we all want, right? How about if I told you a way to get hundreds, thousands, or millions of people to talk about you? I have a little bit of an ego myself. I dig that. I like people doing that, talking about me and what I do. That's what we want; that's the whole goal. How do we get people to feed the system, to be a part of our community?

People say the term viral marketing a lot. They say things like, "Oh, I had a virus last month on my computer. I don't want to learn this, Scott. It was wicked. It said it was the anti-virus '09 and it screwed everything up." Viral marketing has nothing to do with viruses. Viral simply means when a host person gets it out there and it spreads. Now one of the dangers with this kind of marketing is that once it goes, you can't stop it and we'll talk all about that and what's horrible about not being able to stop it. Viral marketing is pretty basic. It does not matter what kind of method you use, whether it is YouTube or "micro viral" like we find on Twitter. It doesn't matter what the medium is. There are four secrets to successful viral marketing that we talk ...