Power of word-of-mouth turned simple everyday thing into Viral Marketing - Rapping Southwest Flight Attendant

Like the spreading of the epidemic Swine Flu H1N1, viral marketing spreads through viral processes to reach a large number of people rapidly. It is word-of-mouth delivered and enhanced online. (Ref.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_marketing)

Below video - A Southwest flight attendant rapped his announcement in March this year, I think is a good example to reflect the power of word-of-mouth.

A passenger on the flight took this video and posted it on Utube. The great number of views made in a short period induced CNN to report it (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbR_0hGxfZI&feature=related).
Knowing how famous this staff had become, Southwest grabbed this opportunity to launch its viral marketing campaign with this famous staff. It invites this famous rapping flight attendant to attend and rap in the company's activities, such as the shareholders' meeting . All his rappings were recorded and posted on Utube. Both Southwest and this flight attendant had become famous in the US.

This example points out two important attributes of viral marketing: 1) Simple everyday things can result in viral marketing, once they are made into something unusual and interesting to draw people's attention as to create word-of-mouth. 2) The power of word-of-mouth can bring out a great effect from a simple thing. This was totally started by an ordinary staff who did something a little bit special, but had caused a great impact. It has acted as free publicity and has raised awareness of Southwest. This positive viral marketing effect works better than any multi-million dollar commercial.

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.

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.