by Stefanina Hill

Created on: January 27, 2009

Viral successes are not mythical beasts which only occur occasionally and inexplicably. If this were the case then large companies would not invest so much time and money in viral marketing and there would not be so many successful campaigns all around us. There is a method to viral marketing, a formula for success that most virals are adhering to.

Viral marketing is technically a "guerrilla marketing" technique traditionally favored by those on a small or non existent budget but the huge potential created by the internet as a marketing tool has made virals part of the advertising agendas of many large companies and hence part of everyday life.

Viral marketing refers to word of mouth advertising or the way in which individuals spread information about a product or service to people they know.

The term viral marketing is most commonly associated with internet marketing since the internet and particularly the internet as we now know it via Web 2.0 is the perfect medium to spread a viral message. Web 2.0 simply means the social aspects of the web including bookmarking sites, social networking sites such as MySpace or video sharing sites such as You Tube.

Web 2.0 means that it is easier than ever for one individual to send a message to a large number of people, who can each then send that message to another set of people. In this way the number of people informed about a product or service can exponentially increase. Viral marketing got its name from this similarity to the way in which biological viruses spread, from one person to another and then from that group to another and so on.

Off-line it can take weeks or even months for information to crawl from person to person, on-line a message can theoretically reach millions in a matter of hours or days. Consequently everyone from big companies to aspiring artists and freelancers are all trying to harness the incredible potential power of the internet in order to make money, spread the word or gain support.

THE OFFER.

A viral campaign offer is usually an offer of something free or a good deal. This free item might be a video to watch on You Tube, an article to read on Helium or an e-mail address such as the ones available from yahoo and hotmail. Viral is all around us.

Anything you have on-line that can be viewed or shared or downloaded has the potential to go viral. On the internet it can seem like virals occur randomly because the focus is on those things which go viral without an accompanying campaign.

So what sets one

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