Ronadinho - Touch of Gold (Nike)

This is the coolest viral video clip I have ever seen in terms of viral marketing! Ronaldinho takes delivery of a new pair of Nike boots and spends over 2 minutes demonstrating the most amazing football skills I have ever seen.

Wow! 23.5 million people have watched this ad on YouTube. Pure genius.

Other tips for Viral Marketing

How an idea spreads and how to make it spread faster is what Viral Marketing all about. One of the keys to success is creativity and intiating added value. The message should be creative enough to develop "buzz". A sense of 'shared value' which relates to share experiences can make the message valuable. Incentives and free offerings for referrals also help to motivate the spreading of the message. A viral campaign requires a clever, highly informative or even a shocking idea which makes compulsive viewing and encourages people to pass it on.

Justin Kirby of viral marketing specialists DMC (http://www.dmc.co.uk/) suggents three things:
- Creative material – the 'viral agent': This includes the creative message or offer, and how

it is spread (text, image, video)
- Seeding: identifying websites, blogs or people to start the virus spreading
- Tracking: to monitor the effect, to assess the return from the cost of developing the viral

agent and seeding.

It seems that viral marketing is not sufficiently controlled and is a rather haphazard process. However, it still requires some degree of strategic planning to motivate people to act.

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.

Viral Marketing's Advantages and Disadvantages

Low costs, extensive reach, high credibility, high efficiency that brings a very quick impact at a relatively low cost is the key driver for marketers wishing to use viral marketing.

Viral marketing can be the remedy against today's technological devices which designed for avoiding recording TV Ads. Besides, the message used for viral marketing has less restriction than that of the traditional Ads which enable greater creativity on creating the viral messages.

However, there are also a lot of disadvantages, such as brand dilution, association with unknown groups, lack of control, limited possibility of segmentation, and spam issues.

Brand dilution is that viral marketing depends on people who are not versed in your brand to do the "selling" for you. Due to the easy and massive proliferations of messages, damage can be enormous if the message is negatively perceived. It may result in misinterpretations and distort the creator's original intent, or make the communication brandless.

Sometimes it may difficult to control. If the message is passed to someone who is not supposed to be associated with, the viral message would then be perceived as spam and lead to damage to the company's reputation and image.

Besides, marketers have to take the risk of losing their investment that if the message cannot go "viral" and stop transmitting.

Definition of Viral Marketing

"Viral Marketing "describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message's exposure and influence. Like viruses, such strategies take advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to thousands, to millions." quoted by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson originally published on Web Marketing Today.

Based on the above definition, we understand that the term "viral marketing" is offensive. The marketing message will be disseminated to everyone with a low cost through using internet. When off the internet, it's also defined as "word-of-mouth" marketing. It seems like to produce the sounds or create some gimmicks through online PR or online advertising and e-mail marketing to make widely known.