What is 'Viral Marketing'?

What is Viral Marketing?

According to the Cambridge Online Dictionary viral marketing is:

           "A marketing activity in which information about a product spreads between                                 people, especially on the internet."

The point of viral marketing is the fact that it gives individuals involved with your project and gives them chance to spread your project around to their friends which is as well beneficial to you as this is completely free. This is often known as social cascading. 

As the internet has become such a powerful media device it is probably the most successful way that you could promote a project because of the easy access each person has not just to friends but those across the world, aiding the development of the project's popularity and success. 

Viral marketing can be many different formats, such as images, documents, videos and even news articles and news or radio broadcasts. 

The key to successful viral marketing are 2 things.

1. TRUST

The audience that you are putting your marketing to must trust the person that they are hearing their information from. For example if a person hears information, that information probably comes from a person that they don't know and to be able to spread that information to another source then they must trust the information is, if you will, trustworthy and legitimate (or believable), to make for that instant buzz of excitement to cause that person to pass on what they have seen or heard.

    2.   HOW BELIEVABLE IS YOUR INFORMATION?

There is a fine line between wowing an audience and then going over the top to the unbelievable! You want to make a project that promotes something almost shocking enough to entice an audience and keep them captivated enough to spread the word, but not too dramatic or outrageously far fetched to deter them.

Successful VS Failed

FAILED - RESIDENT EVIL: OUTBREAK

In 2004, Sony's Resident Evil: Outbreak game released a marketing strategy to promote its release  that backfired, majorly. 

Users received an SMS message to their phone telling them that they were infected with T-Virus, a virus from the game which quickly prompted calls to the company Sophos, a developer and vendor of security software. 

A typical message used in this scheme was:

'Outbreak: I'm infecting you with the T-Virus, my code is -------. Forward this to 60022 to get your own code and chance to win prizes. More at t-virus.co.uk'

The message was largely misconceived as the messages were sent to any numbers without their given consent. So as most of these people would be unaware of the Resident Evil franchise and their infamous fictional 'T-Virus', the customers thought it was an actual technological virus sent to infect their phone.

SUCCESSFUL - THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT

The Blair Witch Project has gone down as the most successfully viral marketed film of all time and the first effective found-footage film of all time. 

The film was released in 1999 filmed all on hand held cameras and the dialog from all 3 main characters was all entirely improvised. The film cost around $25,000 to make.

A year before the film was released a website www.blairwitch.com was released by the films 2 directors. The website gave the story behind the legend of the 'Blair Witch'. Following the film being sold to Artistan Entertainment, both Artistan and the directors worked on the 'Blair Witch' website using many low budget tactics to promote the film. Prior to its release, $1m was spent on the films promotion. 

The website is still up now and consists of information about the Blair Witch, stretching back to as early as 1785 up to 1997 when the 'rediscovered' footage was released and 'asked' to be pieced together by the 'families' of the 'victims' in the film.

The website also includes photo's from the 'victims' preparing for the journey they made in the documentary, their abandoned car and tapes, police search and there are also a number of interviews of the 'victims' family members and people who worked on the case and news reports on the case of the 'victims'.

Trailers were also shot for the film before its release, both extremely disturbing, shown below.

The trailers were shown more on college campuses because not showing it to the big screen saved a lot of money and also made the individuals it was shown to feel like they had stumbled across something they had discovered for themselves.

On the IMDB page the 3 actors were listed as 'missing, presumed dead' and even missing persons leaflets were released and put up around Cannes film festival. 

The website received over 22,000,000 hits and the film took in close to $250,000,000 at the box office. 

Due to appropriate attention to detail, this film was one of the most ingeniously marketed films of all time.