MARKETING
Viral marketing is one of those buzz phrases that enters the vernacular before most people - including those who drop it - know what it means. Essentially, it's a Net strategy built on the premise that a product or service can self-promote and propagate. It's a way of engineering a fad, of making word of mouth pay.
So how does viral marketing work? Consider RocketTalk, a Fullerton, California-based startup that launched its first product in February and is adding new users at an epidemic rate of nearly 4 percent a day. RocketTalk is the voicemail equivalent of Hotmail, the originator of free Web-based email. It offers free software at www.rockettalk.com that records audio messages and lets you email them to a friend. The recipient, in turn, can listen and gets invited to visit the site and record a reply. Without spending a dime, your vox POP pal has been added as a new RocketTalk member. All members become de facto recruiters. In the end the company makes revenues from advertising and comes away with a valuable database of users.
"We are hardcore believers in viral marketing," says founder Jeff Weiner, who agrees that his service is a perfect example. RocketTalk is, after all, about communication, and communication by its very nature involves recipients - aka new customers. RocketTalk also has a host of so-called persistent recruiters: files that people just can't resist forwarding, like off-color jokes.
Other viral examples abound, from eFax, a free online fax service, to Blue Mountain Arts, the e-greeting card company, to sixdegrees, a Web-based network where people sign on principally to, er, network. But perhaps Weiner has the best example of all: "Take the frog-in-a-blender animation that went around. I sent it to all my friends," he says. "That's viral marketing in its purest form."
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