I have been looking around for some nice explanations of viral marketing and came across these old videos by Elon Musk. Check out his Wikipedia entry this guy is seriously not afraid to take on the big issues.

Any ay I like his fairly straight forward info on Viral, (“viral marketing is when on customer sells another without you having to do anything”) and how it worked for PayPal. I had ever really though of PayPal as a viral example but effectively it is even better than Hotmail as an example of real good viral marketing.

I sign up for PayPal and send you cash. You have to sign up for PayPal to receive that cash. Now you are a user and you start sending cash. I guess Ebay must have aided the need for PayPal but just brilliant. They are the virals I love. Those that compel you bring in new users, viewers etc.

The boys over at Freaky robot did something not so long ago. Essentially paper scissor stones but with a soccer / football twist. You want to play great but you must invite your friends in order to have an opponent or the whole game doesn’t work!!

Anyway hear Elon speaking himself

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I have been following a company called Zemanta for a while now.

Zemanta allows bloggers to automatically add content to their blog. It currently runs as a plug in for a number of blogging platforms as well as for FireFox. The mechanics are simple. As I write my blog post the plug in scours various sites for pictures, links or tags that will compliment or enrich the readers experience. From a bloggers point of view it is a great way to save time.

The Viral Bit

What is so neat about this service is that once I add a picture or tag a small Zemanta logo is placed at the bottom of my post. Similarly related articles shown at the bottom of the post are referenced from Zemanta. All this is deletable by the user of course but for me it is an example of viral marketing at its best. They have provided a truly useful service. I do not begrudge the logo being shown, (I can always remove it if i so wish) and consequently their service and product are promoted to whole host of potential new users. Simple hey. It’s the Hotmail idea used in a different way.

(Incidentally they have just added a Gmail function no doubt increasing their viral growth substantially)

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Ok so most know the story of Hotmail. But just to be sure it would be a little remiss of me not to include it here. It is a prime example of how good viral marketing can extremely effectively grow your brand or online service.

So you all know hotmail right? The online free email service. Back in the day, (1996/7) it was one of few. It stood out as an email service becuase;

• It was free.
• You could access it anywhere.
• You could have multiple accounts

The Viral Bit

Users would send their email and each Hotmail message sent arrived in someone’s mailbox with the words “Get your free email at Hotmail” at the bottom.
By clicking on the word Hotmail, the recipient was taken to Hotmail’s home page where the free e-mail service was explained.

How Effective Was It?

Very. People signed up in their thousands.  Myth has it they spent $500, 000 in 2 years to gain 12 million subscribers. That’s U$0.04 per subscriber. Not bad huh? Especially seeing as they soon sold to Microsoft for around $400 million !!!

Such a scheme is unlikely to work in the current climate, but what with the advent of social networks and every day new services such as Twitter hitting the main stream what will be the next big message to go viral in the same way Hotmail did ?