Its viral marketing Jim - but not as we know it

You are probably familiar with viral marketing.  Normally this takes the form of a game or screensaver.  The marketing company launches it and does some marketing to get it started, and when people see it they are so impressed that they email it to their friends. If everyone who gets it sends it to a few people the message quickly spreads.  This type of viral marketing can be very successful and the message can very quickly get distributed to a lot of people.  However it is like one of those summer colds, you get it, you pass it on and pretty quickly it is over and things get back to normal. 

However there is a form of viral marketing which has a much slower growth but lasts for years, continuing to grow and spread the message.  This is by targeting web sites rather than mailboxes.  It goes by a variety of names and formats, such as advertising application (AdApp), or syndicated material, but the basic concept is this.

1. You have something useful which people would like to include on their web site, for example a calculator or a news feed.
2. The ’useful thing’, which for the sake of readability we will call a freebee, includes a link back to your own web page
3. A webmaster visits a site with the freebee, finds it useful and includes it on their own site - including the link.
4. The more places that have the freebee the more likely webmasters will find it and use it and the more links back to your site.

So it is the same basic principle as the regular viral marketing scheme, but it works in slow motion because it relies on webmasters finding the freebee instead of it being mailed to them.  However once they have it, they keep it on their web site giving you exposure to site visitors forever. 

An advertising application or  AdApp is a tool or function of some sort.  Let’s take an example.  We have a currency converter which is available free for anyone to include on their site.  We didn’t do any marketing simply relying on webmasters to find it on each other’s sites.  So with some programming work, but virtually no marketing effort:

• The advertising part of the tool gets a lot of exposure - for free
• It is a demonstration of our capabilities so it works on two levels
• The links back to our site generate a lot of traffic
• The links back to our site improve our pagerank on Google

This type of tool will continue to spread and generate traffic as long as the gadget is useful to people. 

I did a log analysis for yesterday (monday) on the currency converter site.  The app got viewed by 6,200 unique visitors on 320 web site.  (a lot from wicked weasel and looking at their site I can see why!)  Pause ...  ok the converter is here:   www.wickedweasel.com/currency 

Note the link back to our web site.  This is not in the javascript and therefore contributes to our page rank. Damn - their currency page   has a pagerank of zero - never mind there are another 500 odd sites I know of that use it. 

Just to repeat it, the growth is all self-generated.  We have done no marketing apart from a very minor amount of seed marketing at the beginning.  Obviously if you can afford some marketing on day 1 you can start a bit further up the (J shaped) curve.

Another example is a news feed.  On www.bobsguide.com/news.html we have a news feed that anyone can place on their page.  We are still on the early growth phase there, just over 100 sites.  Its been going for maybe a year.  Give it a couple of years and we will have a very useful source of traffic and page rank.  In this case the Javascript is a bit cleverer and refuses to run unless the host site has made the link to our site (on the currency converter it is the honour system).

So think about what sort of tools or data people will want on their web site.  There could be long-term traffic gold in it.

Bob
Textor 

This maybe a good way of generating traffic, but it's not viral marketing! It's simply content syndication or an affiliate orientated promotion. So there's no peer-to-peer advocacy in this model, it's still marketer to consumer, i.e. there's no online word of mouth or word of mouse aka Viral Marketing.

Justin Kirby - UK Spokesperson for the Viral & Buzz Marketing Association (http://www.vbma.net)

To make something truly viral, it's not enough to make it fun. You need to make sure that each person benefits from passing the virus (not just from using it).

Don't mean to spam here as I just joined, but here is an example of one tool that will be launched soon... hopefully :)

http://calc.in-the-name-of-profit.com/86429/ab_test.jsp

And check the ad on the left side, which leads to:

http://calc.in-the-name-of-profit.com/register.jsp

This is the core idea:

"You will receive a unique URL, which will be used to distinguish your audience.
There is no direct way to get to these calculations (ie, you can't just type the domain name), so you can be assured that when people in your audience pass the link to the calculators around, those links will contain your reference number, and will display your ad."

P.S. This tool is not active yet! Don't sign up, I'll remove all ads, once I move it into production. Don't blame me later, you've been warned.