viral marketing

Viral marketing refers to a marketing campaign that is designed to utilize social media and word-of-mouth to spread content. By creating shareable, engaging content, marketers aim to have their message spread exponentially, like a virus transmitting itself through a population.

A viral hit, as it is typically understood, is a piece of content (typically a video, a captioned image commonly referred to as a meme, or some other type of multimedia file) that spreads like proverbial wildfire online. The term viral marketing became widely associated with online marketing after Jeffrey Rayport’s 1996 Fast Company article “The Virus of Marketing”. In the article, Rayport likens the ideal marketing campaign to a virus—one that strikes quickly, costs little, and works effectively. However, viral content does not move around the Internet involuntarily; a viral meme cannot be passed along invisibly with someone’s sneeze, for example. Instead, virality requires that online users pass a piece of content on to others deliberately.

Human existence in an always-on 21st-century digital environment means that people are constantly exposed to various marketing efforts and pieces of advertising in a variety of forms. Viral marketing, consequently, is important to understand because of its ability to break through the otherwise overwhelming digital media landscape that individuals face every day. This entry provides an overview of viral marketing, including the origins of the concept of digital virality and general principles of virality as a phenomenon and then features a discussion of best practices that are intended to make various pieces of marketing and advertising content go viral.

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Origins

While it is unclear exactly when the term viral was first used to describe digital content that seemingly took on a life of its own online, the Oxford English Dictionary notes that one of the earliest recorded uses of the term viral marketing appeared in an article in PC User magazine in 1989. Given the publication of Douglas Rushkoff’s book Media Virus! in 1994, the virus analogy as a description of the spread of media must have been at least moderately common parlance by the beginning of the 1990s, as the World Wide Web became increasingly available to individual households commercially. Rushkoff argued in his book that advertising could, in a sense, act almost literally like a virus, describing susceptible users as becoming infected with ideas that could then spread from person to person more quickly and efficiently. Critics contend, however, that Rushkoff’s ideas seemed too reliant on what is known as the hypodermic needle or magic bullet model of communication, which suggests that users confronted with a media message will consume and accept said message, resulting in powerful and relatively immediate outcomes.

How the Process Works

Since it is now generally accepted that the hypodermic needle model does not accurately represent how the vast majority of media messages are processed by individuals, other explanations for virality have since emerged. One of the leading theories centers on opinion leaders, also known as influencers or connectors—that is, individuals who boast considerable expertise or interest in a particular product category and who are highly connected in a social sense, either offline or online. Opinion leaders, when effectively prompted by brands or firms, have the power to spur potentially massive numbers of people to action. These followers, or individuals who react or respond to the prompting of opinion leaders, may not necessarily qualify as opinion leaders themselves. Even so, each has his or her own personal connections to others through which product information will flow. As a result, an individual’s enthusiasm for a message can cause it to spread even further, potentially reaching even more opinion leaders as well as other followers—and the viral contagion spreads even further.

Many explanations of viral marketing draw on theories of interpersonal influence, especially the idea that opinion leaders help spread media messages through social networks. This idea, called the two-step flow theory of communication, was originally developed by Paul Lazarsfeld and collaborators in the 1940s and elaborated upon by Lazarsfeld and Elihu Katz in the mid-1950s. This concept was updated in the 1980s by communication scholar Gabriel Weimann and colleagues to incorporate the importance of the aforementioned noninfluencers. Weimann calls these individuals “marginally positioned individuals” who nevertheless show significant importance in the process of information flow—indeed, without taking both influencers and marginals into consideration, the viral effect cannot fully be explained.

Roughly speaking, these theories describe the movement of information—in this case, marketing messages—from a sender or source (i.e., the advertiser or firm responsible for the brand), which reaches opinion leaders/influencers along with other less socially dynamic consumers. This is the first step in the flow. From here, influencers tell significant numbers of other people about the brand message (the second step) and those with smaller numbers of connections—that is, the marginals—spread the message even further through additional layers of social interaction. This process continues until the message has reached critical mass, and virality has been achieved.

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Best Practices

Many marketing practitioners argue that opinion leaders and influencers play an important role in spreading viral messages and that a successful viral marketing campaign hinges upon effectively reaching and engaging with these individuals. One study published in the Journal of Marketing determined that, when done properly, seeding a message among well-connected influencers has the potential to make a campaign up to 8 times more successful than it might be otherwise. However, simply reaching out to influencers with a brand- or product-related message is insufficient to spur virality—in other words, not all marketing messages are created equal by default. Indeed, research suggests that marketers must begin with engaging and compelling content but then consider the behavioral patterns and network structures of the individuals they wish to reach and couple these factors with an effective distribution strategy to get the message into the hands of influencers.

One example of a successful viral marketing campaign is that of Hotmail, one of the earliest major providers of free email accounts. The company was able to obtain 12 million subscribers between mid-1996 and the end of 1997 with a marketing budget of only $50,000. Venture capitalist and original Hotmail investor Tim Draper suggested that each message sent using Hotmail be tagged with a phrase: “P.S.: I love you. Get your free email at Hotmail”. This simple inclusion ultimately turned every existing Hotmail user into a salesperson and every email that he or she sent into a free advertisement. Customer acquisition exploded simply by leveraging existing Hotmail users’ social networks and interactions—inserting this simple promotional message exponentially increased awareness of Hotmail, even among consumers who may otherwise have never been reached by traditional marketing means. This effort ultimately translated to a virtually unheard-of customer acquisition cost of less than one-half of one cent per new user.

Final Thoughts

The most successful and memorable viral campaigns contain elements that elevate their messages above the noise created by everyday existence within a media-drenched ecosystem. Digital marketing expert Neil Patel, for example, notes that viral campaigns must appeal to strong emotions, be surprising or unexpected, and should focus on telling a story rather than simply talking about a product. Jonah Berger makes similar recommendations in his book aptly titled Contagious. On balance, the evidence suggests that viral marketing campaigns can indeed be constructed, but they require a great deal of effort, attention, and connections to the right individuals who will feel compelled to share a particular message with others.

The original version of this article was published by SAGE Publications in The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Mass Media and Society.