What is viral marketing?

"Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message's exposure and influence"

A marketing technique that is used to increase brand awareness, to acheive mainly product sales.
It can be done in the forms of;
video clips, interactive online gaming,ebooks, brandable software,images and even text massages.

Viral Marketing must have these 6 elements to be powerful and effective;

1.Gives away products or services
2.Provides for effortless transfer to others
3.Scales easily from small to very large
4.Exploits common motivations and behaviors
5.Utilizes existing communication networks
6.Takes advantage of others' resources

A good example of early viral marketing is the hotmail email messaging service. That cleverly used the word "Free"

"As Hotmail was a free email service provider it could control, to a certain extent, the format of all outbound messages that each Hotmail account holder sent. It was this fact that led them to come up with a viral marketing campaign that has yet to beaten and saw their traffic skyrocket and eventually lead to Microsoft buying the company as a result of their exponential growth.

So what did they do? Simple. To the footer of each outgoing email they attached a signature file that read:

"To get your FREE email account goto www.hotmail.com".

As more and more people received emails from existing Hotmail account holders so the word spread about their free email service and the rest, as they say, is history."

"FREE" is the most powerful word in a marketers vocab. They "give away" valuble products or services to attract attention to their product.
It practises "delayed gratification" which basically means they do not profit immidiatley but they generate "free" interest because they know the profit will soon profit.
It is called "viral marketing" because like a virus, it is designed to develop and spread very quickly, and cause big impact.
It works well on the internet because internet is instant communication and is so easy an inexpensive. Digital format also makes copying so simple.