One of the leading industry buzzwords for the last few years has been “Viral Marketing”. But in many respects, viral marketing isn’t something that can be forced to occur without planning and developing a strategy to promote and a method for the message to spread.

What is Viral Marketing?
Simply put, viral marketing is a marketing message that focuses on building brand awareness, a call to action, or merely visitors and attention through non-traditional marketing channels. This is generally perpetuated by encouraging visitors or fans of the message to send it along – creating a virus-like marketing effect.

How is Viral Marketing different from traditional marketing channels?
Traditional marketing channels include: Pay per click contextual marketing, targeted email marketing, banner advertising, and more. Viral marketing has no pre-defined or specific medium to draw visitors, it can be a website, video, audio, or even something else.

Game Theory meets Marketing
One of the most important elements of Viral marketing is the intersection between game theory and marketing applications. Essentially, game theory is the process of explaining why we like to play games, and how to align a sufficient amount of challenge with a rewarding result. Marketing generally tries to accomplish a different purpose by simply placing the offer or message in front of the consumer for quick & simple consumption. Viral marketing can be described as the intersection of these two elements because the point is to create something that involves enough intrigue and play factor, yet still accomplishes some marketing objective.

Simple Form Viral Marketing
The simplest thing a viral marketer can try to do is introduce the notion that whatever the user is experiencing can be sent on or suggested to another individual (or multiple individuals). Usually this is accomplished with a simple “Email this to a friend” form. New Web 2.0 solutions have been innovated to make viral suggestion even easier. Services from Digg.com, Fark.com, Del.icio.us all provide ways to bookmark and suggest certain things to a larger audience (often composed of overlapping social networks to carry successful messages along). Once a message has assembled a high volume of networked popularity, these services raise popular referred items to larger and more anonymous sets of social networks.

Advanced Form Viral Marketing
BK’s Subservient ChickenMany companies have attempted an advanced viral marketing technique in the last few years. One of the largest and most successful viral productions was Burger King’s “Subservient Chicken”. This website, launched in 2004, features a live action actor in a chicken suit, that you, the website visitor, can command to perform a wide variety of tasks. Obviously this required a pretty decent amount of preparation to construct, but it simply meant connecting a number of predefined actions together and being able to cue up different videos based on user input.

The beauty of the entire campaign was its uniqueness (it was the first large-scale site like this, although many other companies have tried to replicate it with limited success). Game theory also came in to play, since the commands weren’t laid out to the visitor ahead of time. Users had to experiment and play with the website to learn what this “chicken” was capable of. And, the most important viral marketing element was included as well – the “Tell a Friend” feature, which opens an email client with the humorous email content “Finally, somebody in a chicken costume who will do whatever you want.”, and a link to the promotion.

This is an example of Viral Marketing at its finest. No massive Burger King logo (just a small copyright mention, and a link to BK’s website). But the net results were, according to Burger King “… a success.” According to statistics found at Adweek, “Within a week, [SubservientChicken.com] had received 20 million hits.”

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