The term "viral marketing" has been used negatively to refer to stealth marketing campaigns—the unscrupulous use of astroturfing combined with black-hat advertising to create the impression of mass spontaneous enthusiasm when only the interest of a few individuals are being served.

While there are a few black sheep, viral marketing is not evil. At its core, viral marketing refers to marketing techniques that leverage on your social networks to increase brand awareness or to achieve product sales through self-replicating viral processes, much like a computer virus. Viral marketing is however, not infinitely sustainable.



Viral marketing can take the form of traditional word-of-mouth promotion or is enhanced by the network effects of the Internet, which can the use of video clips, interactive Flash games, advert-games, social media, ebooks, brandable software, images, or even text messages.

To create successful viral marketing programs, most viral marketers first identify individuals with high Social Networking Potential (SNP) and create viral messages that appeal to this segment of the population and have a high probability of being passed along.

We can track the beginnings of Viral Marketing to a Harvard Business School graduate, Tim Draper. The term became popular when Tim Draper and Steve Jurvetson of the venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson in 1997 held Hotmail up as a successful example with its email practice of appending advertising for itself in outgoing mail from their users.

Media critic Douglas Rushkoff made a reference to viral marketing on the Internet in his 1994 book Media Virus. He postulated that if a viral advertisement reaches a "susceptible" user, that user will become "infected" (i.e., accept the idea) and will then go on to share the idea with others "infecting them," like a virus.

As long as each infected user shares the idea with more than one user on average (i.e., the basic reproductive rate is greater than one - the standard in epidemiology for qualifying something as an epidemic), the number of infected users will grow according to a logistic curve, whose initial segment appears exponential.

Of course, the viral marketing campaign may be wildly successful even if the rate at which things are spread isn't of epidemic proportions, if this user-to-user sharing is sustained by other forms of marketing communications, such as public relations or traditional advertising.

Bob Gerstley in "Advertising Research is Changing" sheds more light into viral marketing by exploring algorithms to identify people with high Social Networking Potential. The SNP algorithms in quantitative marketing research have been invaluable in helping marketers maximize the effectiveness of viral marketing campaigns.

In 2004 the concept of Alpha User was released to indicate that it had become now possible to technically isolate the focal point members of any viral marketing campaign, the "hubs" who are most influential. Alpha Users can today be isolated and identified, and even targeted for viral advertising purposes most accurately in mobile phone networks, as mobile phones are so personal.

Since its humble beginning, many sites have been started up to exploit the wonders of viral marketing and yielded many successful internet marketers.