Introduction to Viral Marketing

Viral marketing may be defined as a technique that takes advantage of social networks in order to increase marketing objectives, for example in relation to movies, ticket and DVD sales. A viral marketing strategy goes about this through self-replicating processes, these being equivalent to the spread of pathological or computer viruses. In broad terms then, viral marketing creates buzz through “word of mouth” and its effectiveness has been enhanced by the revolutionary media innovation commonly known as the Internet.

However, viral marketing is not a recent invention, it has been around from its humble beginnings, hundreds of years ago, in the form of word of mouth or sharing entertaining stories with friends. With the advent of the Internet however, the time something takes to become viral has been drastically reduced so that now, word takes literally no more than seconds to spread from one person to another. It’s little wonder then that viral marketing is one of the most popular and widely used means of marketing within today’s social mediascape making it near impossible for one to not have been exposed to viral marketing in some form and indeed, the form I take particular interest in is when viral marketing is used to drive the sales of movies.