Justin Kirby

Managing Director, Digital Media Communications (DMC)

Connected marketing techniques such as word of mouth are firmly back on the marketing agenda. This phenomenon has been formalized during the past decade by specialist books, including Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point,1 Emanuel Rosen's Anatomy of Buzz2 and Seth Godin's Unleashing the Ideavirus3.The hype about word of mouth marketing's potential for achieving viral-like message spread has also been fuelled by well-known success stories, such as Hotmail and The Blair Witch Project (see the Introduction). However, one of the most significant contributing factors to the current vogue for word of mouth marketing is the rapid uptake of digital media - particularly the Internet and its peer-to-peer technologies such as chatrooms, forums, instant messaging programmes, blogs, and file transfer and social networks - which enable messages to spread faster and more exponentially than ever before.

Digital media's capabilities to turbo-charge the viral spread of information means that well-planned and well-executed connected marketing initiatives - particularly those that integrate more traditional marketing communications techniques in their activities - can help business messages reach the mass market in a way that would require a significant investment if left to more traditional techniques alone.

This capability for mass-market reach is important. Some connected marketing techniques, such as influencer marketing (see Chapters 1 and 7) and live buzz marketing (see Chapter 2) that rely on offline communication, can help improve brand advocacy, which in turn aids business growth.4 However, they are not necessarily the most effective ways of creating brand awareness.

Viral marketing - especially when used as an integrated rather than isolated approach - can both improve brand advocacy and increase mass-market brand awareness.And it can achieve those objectives very cost-effectively, even if your brand, product, or service has no standout, buzzworthy characteristic.

This chapter reveals how and why viral marketing can achieve these aims, examining some of the techniques and the high-profile campaigns that have helped catapult connected marketing into the marketing communications limelight.

Continue reading here: A brief history of viral marketing

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