Viral marketing – SiteTrail as a platform for useful viral press releases:

Sites include Twitter.com . Published on October 14th, 2012. Written by SiteTrail.

Every successful campaign of buzz marketing, viral marketing and useful press release requires the right partnership. SiteTrail is a promoter of useful content in relation to web2.0 news and helps users trail their favourite websites. Now SiteTrail will also enable websites to attract more users through featured articles as a starting point for viral campaigns.

But what is Viral marketing?

In order to establish a new trend, it is essential that the message is spread through social channels, in various directions and replicated, typically in such a way that the rule of binary fusion would apply. Imagine if you would that the binary fusion model whereby a virus that sweeps across a chicken farm starts with one little rooster on a Monday and by Thursday afternoon an entire poultry population of 20 000 has been affected – well that is exactly how viral marketing works. Why do you think Hillary Clinton was so upset when Arab leaders had switched off twitter and facebook during last years revolution?  They were attempting to kill the virus! How did the London Riots of 2011 spread nationwide in a matter of 24 hours? Simple: There existed a very strong message appealing to a particular audience enabled by compounded transmission basis presenting itself in the form of viral activity which was as unstoppable as the example mentioned above.

Essentially, with online viral marketing campaigns, once someone let the cat out the bag with Viral marketing, there is no way of stopping it unless one of two things happened:

a)      We terminate all internet connections across the world OR

b)      A much stronger message (viral agent) is sent in the opposite direction through faster and stronger channels – which would be the antibiotic so to speak.

When a message, about a brand if you like, is presented in such a way that it is likely to attract  significant social attention, the only other component required to make a successful viral marketing campaign would be strong transmission basis. The perfect message combined with a strong transmission basis – or several such basis can create a viral marketing campaign that is unstoppable, so much so that in the case of products being sold by phone, it could easily quadruple the required telesales team capacity overnight, thus resulting in a high commercial yield.

More examples of viral marketing:

During the early days of Mr. Bill Gates’s team succeeded to ensure that Hotmail was able to sign up 12 million users within a matter of just 18 months, how? They displayed a simple message stating that users could “Get a free email account” on the bottom of all correspondence sent out. Off course in those days people had to pay for an email account.

Football game in Europe: A famous football club in Europe wanted to ensure that all tickets are sold out for an event in low season. It released a video from some very famous players but required viewers to enter their mobile numbers prior to enabling the video to be displayed. At the same time a famous football player had pre-recorded a message stating that he is considering to stay home unless there will be enough fans present, that pre-recorded message was sent personally to fans who watched the video. Within 24 hours there has been over 200 000 page views for the video!

Today, where large publishers such as Mashable, SiteTrail, TechCrunch, CNET and others have RSS feeds and Twitter feeds in place, it equates to a formidable launching base which circulates viral messages in a manner which will penetrate communities across the world and Viral Marketing has become one of the strongest forms of brand building in the world.

Viral marketing may represent itself as either one or a combination of methods including a well written article or news release, video, radio message, email, text message. It can have one or more starting points. We suggest that new users experiment with viral marketing campaigns with one starting point at a time to ensure that they have sufficient resources to coupe with any surprizes such as a higher than expected rate of response, where fulfilment is required.

How does SiteTrail and other large publishers enable a viral campaign to be launched?

1. By posting interesting news accessible to large numbers of readers which is accessible through web search;
2. Already large crowds of subscribers are looking out for specific news and discover your press release;
3. By sharing Twitter, RSE and Facebook feeds which is syndicated, essentially triggering the viral marketing effect.
4. By maintaining an online presence long after the initial buzz of the press release has calmed down.

Ready to try viral marketing today?

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