Nov
Viral marketing has been the new buzz term in recent times, advertising that’s not really advertising, people feeling like they’ve found something on their own and something worth telling their friends about. But what makes up a viral campaign, and what makes them successful?
What is a Viral Campaign?
Viral marketing and viral advertising are marketing techniques that use social networks like facebook, twitter, and myspace to bring brand awareness, and increase product sales via word of mouth. The term viral comes from the way computer viruses replicate, spreading from one person to the next, with minimal effort on the virus writer’s part; the same happens with viral marketing. There are many ways these campaigns can be conducted; videos, games, free branded software, pictures, forum postings, and text messaging are all used.
A successful campaign will be able to target the people in the right market, bring them to the product, and gain new customers outside of where they were marketing. A good example of this is the viral campaigns conducted by Taylor Herring PR company for the Disney Channel, utilizing social media to bring new customers in an exciting way to properties like High School Musical, the Jonas Brothers, and Hannah Montana. They did this by creating a broad range of websites with interactive games, videos, and other entertaining media to bring out their market, young people and even their parents. Most surprising is the amount of parents who have commented on the campaigns, finding it fun and interesting, instead of annoying and invasive.
A more recent example is the Old Spice Campaign. They first started posting videos on youtube, minimizing their tv budget but maximizing impact. The biggest component of their campaign was that it was interactive, the advertising company (Wieden) seeded major social networks with invitations to people to ask the Old Spice Man, any question they could think of. By doing this, they opened up the door to all sorts of crazy questions, and the Old Spice Man, spent days answering them. He replied to each person by name or username, bringing a real interactive component to their campaign.
A successful campaign will engage their markets, interact, and most importantly be fun.


![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=07cba430-582c-43c3-9d03-e9c040519395)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=90afeed4-758b-4e2d-9061-eab14f234af7)
