Viral Marketing

Know about viral marketing?

Wikipedia defines it as follows:

Viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that seek to exploit pre-existing social networks to produce exponential increases in brand awareness, through viral processes similar to the spread of an epidemic. It is word-of-mouth delivered and enhanced online; it harnesses the network effect of the Internet and can be very useful in reaching a large number of people rapidly.

Get it? It means that you just can’t resist passing on details about some product or service because the very act of passing it on is such fun. 

I’ve see two examples this week, one of which is good and the other, I think rather poor.

The poor one is microsoft which is trying to get bloggers like me to pass on details of its new thingy so that by launch date everyone knows what it is. A video of the new thingy was allegedly left "accidently" on a website and so bloggers are saying look at this and pointing to it. I saw the video a week ago. Have I passed it on to you, my readers? Oh no. Any for why? Well, the leaked advert video pointed one to a website for the new thingy which told you the launch date and the date was in US format (ie 9/3/2006 meaning 9 March 2006). I figure that if Microsoft still can’t employ an advertising agency capable of getting this right, then its thingy probably won’t be localised well for the UK either. So, no link. You can find it on your own.

However, here is a delicious one that is worth passing on. 

Someone from St Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Birmingham, Alabama in the US has produced a radio ad that is irresistable.

You can hear it courtesy of the Church Marketing Sucks website:

http://www.churchmarketingsucks.com/audio/Monster_Truck_FULL_60.mp3

"See the St Andrews Acolyte Drill Team…"