A Viral Marketing Primer
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> Viral Marketing
By
Brad Powers and Bryan
Eisenberg
Do Everything Right First
Your
potential customers now have the power to tell colleagues, friends and family
about great website experiences in greater numbers and far faster than we could
have imagined just a few years ago. Think of the power of a dense email address
book and a few mouse clicks. In fact, that is the "fuel" behind viral
marketing. The downside is they can do the same thing regarding bad experiences
with the same efficiency and speed. Research has shown that people share bad experiences
up to 5 times more often than they tell about good ones. Before you post a site
to your server and invite people to visit it, everything should be quality tested
and in perfect order. While software makers can sometimes get away with shipping
buggy software, you can't issue a "patch" to a site that has already
turned off your target audience because in this market, your audience will go
somewhere else, fast. And instead of gaining customers "geometrically",
you'll be losing them exponentially.
Two Tools: Buttons
and Links
There are two basic tools in your viral marketing
arsenal: buttons and links. The idea is that with a single click a visitor can
share your site with others, and those people in turn can do the same. The goal
in designing and placing these buttons and links is to make them obvious, easy-to-use,
and perhaps even rewarding to use. By making your buttons more obvious, you give
the visitor a visual cue to pass your site on to a friend and take an active role
in the creation of your own viral marketing campaign. You can take an even more
active role and move beyond mere suggestion by actually offering your visitors
an incentive to pass something on.
