Catch That Viral

Viral marketing has been around since, well Eve convinced Adam to take a bite of the forbidden Apple way back when. Since it’s rather diabolical introduction viral marketing has become an integral part of any marketing activity. While the offline version of viral has traditionally been through word-of-mouth, online the credit for inventing viral marketing, though not the term itself, goes to hotmail.com

When Hotmail launched every outgoing message contained an advertisement for Hotmail and a link to its website at the bottom of the e-mail. As more people used the service, they were also advertising it and helping it reach out to a wider audience. This enabled hotmail to quickly scale up its membership. Of course the more people that joined and sent out emails only helped increase its reach.

The early hotmail example led to a virtual explosion of viral campaigns online. Companies have taken the link example to the extreme embedding even heavy video files onto emails…hoping for the viral effect. Websites set up elaborate viral emailing schemes based around free content for example: joke-a-day, story-a-day, newsletters etc. But as with everything else online what this did in fact do was create the overkill effect. Too much of anything is poisonous and viral marketing too seemed destined for a quick eclipse.

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If it is back today, it is thanks to two developments. The first was YouTube’s explosive arrival as the video content provider to the world and social networking platforms. The YouTube phenomenon has been extensively chronicled and so does not need repeating here. Suffice to say that most companies now view a viral video campaign as an essential part of their marketing plans. YouTube also helped smaller companies, cash-strapped groups put out great videos and increasing their reach. For long YouTube remained on the periphery of the Indian web experience due to low availability of bandwidth. However, things are changing fast. While bandwidth is still an issue Indians, like the rest of the world, are increasingly going online to watch videos.

Add social networking on YouTube and you have the foundation for making your viral happen. I have noticed an interesting change take place on my network. Where previously my group of friends would post status reports, links to articles and some videos, sharing of videos is increasingly becoming the most popular activity by my group of online buddies. We share everything from funny “slice of life” videos, to TV clips from reality shows, movie trailers and yes the really really good viral campaigns. One campaign that has caught the fancy of most of us is the Virgin telecom series of ads that were supposedly banned during IPL. It’s a simple ad where a bunch of fans call up and tease each other about their teams. Simple, funny and absolutely contagious, it has far outlived the tournament itself.

This is where you come in. Making a viral video is not expensive. All you need is a good story that you know gets your message across but is good enough for people to enjoy and pass on. Videos that display empathy, passion, patriotism and above all humor are prime candidates to get on the viral bandwagon. These are not expensive to produce.

We costed a video at under Rs. 10,000 that we are in the process of developing for a viral campaign. You can use this route too and reach out to an audience that would normally cost you millions of marketing rokda.

Surajit Agarwal is the Managing Editor of Chip magazine and Compareindia.com.