Viral Marketing's history and development

The history of Viral Marketing is as old as word-of-mouth sales talk. Technology has created an intense expansion of such old concept to develop the Viral Marketing.(www.womma.org/wom101) The term "Viral Marketing" was first coined in 1997 in a Netscape newsletter. It was defined as "network-enhanced word-of-mouth".

As far as the Internet is concerned, Viral Marketing has its roots in free e-mail services and the appending advertising for themselves to outgoing mail from their users. The assumption is that if such an ad reaches a user, he will become "infected" and then go on to infect other users. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_marketing/) The classic Viral Marketing campaign started with the Hotmail free e-mail service. It attaches a simple tag at the bottom of every free message sent out: "free email at www.hotmail.com" .

Other similar campaigns on the Web gradually appeared in the form of Viral Marketing like Hotmail did, such as ICQ. Another example of Viral Marketing is the viral broadcasts. A well-know use of Viral Marketing to promote the "buzz" about a film was the 1999 campaign, The Blair Witch Project. It used websites and chat rooms to create a high degree of interest prior to the release of the film.

Today, accompanied by the technology development, techniques used to avoid recording TV ads may one of the incentives for more viral marketing because marketers feel their traditional commercials are ignored.