Viral Marketing - The Reason & Nxt Kolaveri

The latest rage on social networking sites is the song sung by Dhanush ,son-in law of Tamil Superstar Rajnikath ,called "Why this Kolaveri Di"  which has generated more than 11 million views on Youtube ,1.5 million downloads  & innumerable tweets & retweets on Twitter .It is in vogue all across the world from Night clubs in Birmingham to Social get-togethers in New Jersey.
The underlying reason for this hysterical sucess is a marketing technique called Viral Marketing.

Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message's exposure and influence.

It also refers  to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives (such as product sales) through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of viruses or computer viruses.

It can be delivered by word of mouth or enhanced by the network effects of the Internet. Viral marketing may take the form of video clips, interactive Flash games, advergames,  ebooks , brandable software, images, or text messages.

Elements of a Viral Marketing Strategy

      1.   Gives away products or services.

      2.  Provides for effortless transfer to others

      3.   Scales easily from small to very large

4    4.   Exploits common motivations and behaviors

      5.  Utilizes existing communication networks

  6.  Takes advantage of others' resources.

The ultimate goal of marketers interested in creating successful viral marketing programs is to create viral messages that appeal to individuals with high social networking potential (SNP) and that have a high probability of being presented and spread by these individuals and their competitors in their communications with others in a short period of time.

Top Viral Marketing Campaign of all time :

Hotmail

In todays era of social networking it’s easy to think how quickly the likes of Facebook and Myspace grew but the real viral marketing pioneer was Hotmail.
In December 1996 Hotmail had 500,000 registered users – less than a year later they had over 12,000,000 users. This astonishing growth rate was down to the fact that every single email sent from Hotmail included a small advert promoting the service in the footer.

 

Ronaldinho: Touch of Gold (Nike)

. Watch as Ronaldinho takes delivery of a new pair of boots and spends over two minutes demonstrating the most amazing football skills the internet has ever seen.

Subservient Chicken (Burger King)

Launched in 2004 and racking up an amazing 46 million views in the first week Subservient Chicken is deserving of a place on any viral marketing list.

Gorilla Advert (Cadbury’s)

Another recent example of how an amazing advert can get millions more views thanks to the web comes in the form of a gorilla playing the drums for Cadbury’s.