best viral marketing examples you've seen?

Nice link, thanks

 

first of all hotmail....was the pioneer in becoming successful with viral marketing.

and secondly mr mike filsaime with this leaked chapter of butterfly marketing manuscript was a good example. I recommend you view that one to have a look.

cheers

 

I'm interested in what your opinion of Success is? Not starting an argument... I'm just interested.

Chain Letters would be the Pioneers, if not The Bible or Religion in General, and how can Hotmail be more successful than those? Or are you referring to the Internet?

 

I have to 2nd what tlainevool said, Conquer Your Niche Forum launched yesterday morning and as of right now has almost 9,000 members registered. It isn't the biggest feat but it is going on right now.

 

I would guess that LinkExchange was before hotmail and it was a big thing back then.

 

Well that's not a big feat in my opinion. I'd hate to "take away their shine" but the fact of the matter is: Michael Rasmussen has about 10,000 Internet Marketing Buddies that were giving the link out to their list... it's not "viral" if you're shooting an email to already established lists. Much like Michael Filsaimes "Leaked Chapter" up there.

While some may THINK this is "viral marketing" - it's NOT. Viral is slowly spreading person to person - not 100,000 people to 10,000 people each. That's called Pre-Launching

 

Yes you are correct about the pre-launch...The viral part hasn't kicked in yet. As I stated it is occuring right now! It just opened up this last Thursday. I am saying is that it is a viral forum...it will only continue to grow. If you still doubt...go check it out!

 

No, I don't doubt you that the Viral effect will start soon - I know it will. But the first week, in my opinion, is probably close to 95% Email Lists coming in from all of his affiliates.

No need to see it... I've been there and I recieved approximately 20 Emails about it

 

But even these initial emails are viral. Why do you think you are receiving the emails? Because all of these people get rewarded for referring other people.

The Wikipedia entry for Viral marketing calls this "incentivized viral":

If this was just a regular forum that didn't have this unique referral program, you wouldn't have gotten those 20 emails.

 

No, how this worked was as follows:

Let's say Mike Filsaime had 50,000 Subscribers in one Email list, right? Well, now he gets the word from his buddy Michael Rasmussen to "do him a favor"... so he blasts out 50,000+ Emails (+ because he usually sends it out twice) to "check out the forum".

Now when you let 50,000+ people know about this - it's NOT initially Viral Marketing in any way. You're MASS MARKETING, which is very different from Viral Marketing.

To be blunt... anything these types of Marketers create - has NO TIME to be viral. They create products and push them out the door quickly so they can get ready for their next pre-launch. Sad but true...

 

Clenard, I have to congradulate you on making a excellent post (GREEN REP!). I agree with you completely. Clearly, many marketing 'gurus' cannot distinguish between viral marketing and mass-marketing. Throwing out 100,000 emails to spread the word is not considered as viral; but a blatant attempt to market in the masses.

You are wrong there tlainevool. These marketing 'geniuses' often create brand awareness by heavily promoting whatever they're doing through their opt-lists. If you happen to be on one (or one of their guru buddies), then you'll receive an email.

Successful viral marketing SHOULD NOT require a reward or an incentive. Prime examples are Hotmail, Myspace and Youtube.

Cheers

 

I won't argue this point because I have no way of knowing whether the initial emails were sent out as a favor, or because of the viral aspect of the marketing.

Viral marketing can most definitely use incentives. A prime example of this is AllAdvantage. They went from 0 to 750,000 users in two weeks. This is because they paid people for their referrals. Steve Jurvetson (who coined the phrase 'viral marketing') used AllAdvantage as an example of viral marketing in this Red Herring article.

 

homestead's free pages were very viral six years back. Hotmail is probably the best viral example I can think of.

 

That guy doing the 'Numa Numa' song is viral and I still can't figure out why.

 

I think the correct definition of viral marketing is when the news spreads by word of mouth without any incentive from the owner.

I.e. you tell 1 person, he likes it and spreads the word to his friends. It has to be natural.

 

No, it doesn't. As I explained above, Steve Jurvetson who invented the term "viral marketing" used AllAdvantage as an example of great viral marketing. AllAdvantage did use an incentive.

 

Heya,
I think for bloggers, our blogs are our marketing tool, and i feel that inserting affiliate links are fair game.

there's a darwinian process where if the product sucks or tanks, the prospect wouldn't go through with it anyway.

affiliate mktg is a CPA, not on a CTR payment scheme.

i don't feel as altruistic as Darren Rowse to say 'may contain affiliate link'.

when you go to a WalMart, they don't have signs saying 'we make money from your purchase'

we live in a capitalist society.
we need to earn income to buy food, support our families, pay study loans.

 

one of the most viral marketing means i've found is the distribution of free blog templates.

for example, have you seen the number of backlinks for wordpress template developers?

some of them have thousands of backlinks and PRs of 7 or 8.

pretty awesome i think.
and all from the credit at the bottom of the template.

 

I will come up with the best viral idea once I have the money to develop it.

=)

 

One of the more successful viral marketing campaigns that i think has been overlooked in this thread is miniclip.com. Back in the early days of the website they made the smart decision to put up a selection of their flash games for download so that other webmasters could download the games and use them on their websites. The games were heavily miniclip.com branded with links back to miniclip all over the place. People then jumped on this and started making "online game websites" using games that were provided for free on miniclip (and other similar websites), the webmasters would then advertise their new websites and drive a lot of traffic to miniclip.

More websites then decided to go this route and some evolved the idea even more with things like "high score" features built into the flash games. This was even better because the webmaster with the new "flash game website" would host the flash file but the user would be sent back to the main website to "submit their score" meaning the website who was the creater of the flash file would still get the page impressions for their banners but they would save on a hell of a lot of bandwidth. It's a great idea and it worked, and still is working very successfully for miniclip to this day.

There are a lot of other similar services like this that people are starting to jump on. Flash widgits for myspace profiles and websites are starting to make an impression, things like photobucket and slide.com are having great success with miniclips marketing model.