Viral Marketing - Another Set of New Clothes for the Emperor?

fingal asks: "I've recently started working for a company who has decided that viral marketing is The Way Forwards. I've got mixed feelings about this. As the sysadmin who has to deal with the aftermath of hosting our own stuff and dealing with the inevitable congestion associated with the (rapidly increasing) size of attachments that are routinely moved about, it just winds me up. On the other hand - I very much enjoy checking out what people are up to (except when they email it to me and I'm on a dial-up...), but I don't think that I've ever actually bought anything as a result. What does everyone think about about this (either from the viewpoint of a consumer, provider or infrastructure engineer)?" Here is a better definition of the term "viral marketing". What are your thoughts on this subject?

Here's the REAL everything2.com definition

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is a better definition of the term "viral marketing". What are your thoughts on this subject?

Er, you just pointed to the everything2.com homepage. And while that is an example of HOW viral marketing is carried out, I think your primary intent was to point to the everything2 definition, which is here:

http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=605630 [everything2.com]

Correct link for E2

[cromano]

The right link is http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=605630 [everything2.com].

In short, it's the practice of having people post "reviews" or "opinions" into usenet/forums/irc, that are actually paid adverts by the company.

From that page: This isn't like traditional spam, as it's not repetitive or obvious. Some attempts are made to make the posts appear 'genuine'.

Cheers,
Your Friendly Karma Whore.

Re:Correct link for E2

[DeadSea]

In short, it's the practice of having people post "reviews" or "opinions" into usenet/forums/irc, that are actually paid adverts by the company.

This is very different than what I have known as viral marketing. ICQ did a great job of viral marketing to get their chat client to be the most popular. They did this by having the chat client prompt you to tell all of your friends about it.

Viral marketing is having your product communicate with each of your customers contacts. The viral part of it is that it has exponential growth. As the number of customers grow, the number of messages sent will grow.

This really makes sense for some products such as chat clients that are meant for communication. If you made a fridge that said "Hi, check me out!" whenever somebody new walked into the kitchen, you would have made a fridge with viral marketing. I don't know how much sense that would make given that fridges don't usually communicate and adding viral marketing might increase the costs significantly.

Re:OT: Richard Stallman and open source software

[Anonymous Coward]

What the hell are you talking about, dude? ESR didn't "rip off" his Open Source Definition, no matter what RMS wants you to think. OSS was a briliant innovative idea, which gave us such software like Linux operating system. I thought we were pro-Linux, not anti-Linux here on slashdot? Because Linus Torvalds, who wrote his great OS in 1991, is advocating Open Source Movement, not Free Software movement. And remember that he is the man who gave us the most stable operating system we can have today, if we don't want to pay Microsoft a dime. Show some respect to his work, not everyone can write a whole operating system while still being a student.