VIRAL marketing !

WORDS OF MOUTH : viral marking



HOT MAIL VIRAL MARKETING :

The special catalyst for Hotmail's torrid growth is called "Viral Marketing" - not because any traditional viruses are involved, but because of the pattern of rapid adoption through word-of-mouth networks
http://www.dfj.com/cgi-bin/artman/publish/steve_tim_may97.shtml

" Elements of Viral Marketing:
The Hotmail adoption pattern is that of a virus - with spatial and network locality. People typically send e-mails to their associates and friends; many of them are geographically close, and others are scattered around with clusters in areas of high Internet connectivity. We would notice the first user from a university town or from India, and then the number of subscribers from that region would rapidly proliferate. The beauty of it is that none of this required any marketing dollars. Customers do the selling.

Digital viruses can spread internationally more rapidly than biological viruses that rely on the physical proximity of hosts for their spread - via a sneeze or handshake. Hotmail is the largest email provider in Sweden and India despite the fact that they have done no marketing of any sort in these countries. It's a happy day when you discover your business has displaced several entrenched competitors to become the market share leader in a country you have never visited. What's more, Hotmail is used in over 220 countries, despite the limitation that it is only available in English.

Viral Marketing captures the essence of multi-level-marketing and applies it to all customers - the "word-of-mouth" spread of the Hotmail message is involuntary. And it's more powerful than many other marketing techniques that lack the implied endorsement from a friend. Hotmail had "Free Email" buttons on several other highly-trafficked web sites, but they generated comparatively negligible numbers of subscriptions. Juno has shown that advertising is relatively cost-ineffective. It is hard to spend your way to Hotmail-like growth. The snowball effect is a mechanism to greatly leverage a first-mover advantage. Whenever a product involves people other than the purchaser, then there is an opportunity to market to potential new customers. It is no surprise that Amazon encourages its customers to send a book as a gift to a friend. When the recipient receives the gift book, the packaging contains a flyer for the amazon.com service. Similarly, whenever someone uses iShip.com to send a package, the recipient will learn about how iShip.com can save them money on their shipping needs. "