The Viral Effect

The concept of viral marketing was created by media critic Doug Rushkoff who made an amusing observation. He explains the phenomenon as a scenario where an advertisement reaches a ‘susceptible’ user who becomes infected, or rather accepts the idea, and shares it with others, thereby ‘infecting them’ as well. It is when almost every member in this chain shares the idea with more than one ‘susceptible’ user—the standard in epidemiology for qualifying something as an epidemic—resulting in an exponential growth of infected users on an exponential curve, one can say that the advertisement had a viral effect.

Viral marketing is obviously the best form of marketing out there, considering that it’s not only cost effective (read free) and requires very little or no effort on the part of the owner of the content. It is, what you’d traditionally call, word-of-mouth publicity. All you have to do is ensure that the content is unique.

Online surveys too reach a larger audience when they go viral. Your work ends when you send a survey or a quiz or even a poll invite to a friend or rather post it on a social networking website. You can now sit back with a tall glass of chilled iced tea and watch your favorite sitcom on television while your friends do the marketing for you. If your survey/quiz is good enough, it will infect your friends and cause an epidemic in no time.

Hello, Hola!

I have always been partial to multimedia surveys; surveys that can be customized; the ones that can don the look of the subject it serves. This aspect of surveys has always been my favorite. In fact, I actually tend to spend more time customizing my survey layouts rather than creating the main questionnaire

And why not? People often fall for the visual appeal. They check the layout and colors before sitting down to actually read it. In fact, a boring survey layout may not attract a person enough to participate, but a colorful survey with attractive images and videos may compel them to be involved. 

Luckily for me, online survey tools have introduced some lovely advanced customization options. You can make maximum use of the space offered by dragging the question boxes around and arranging them in a grid of sorts, thereby making them appear shorter. Throw in some French or Mandarin words for some additional charm, or create a survey in another language altogether! This will help you connect with your audience in their native language and strike a chord on a more personal level. Of course you can add images and videos, a sure way to attract them participants. In fact, some online survey tools even allow you to customize buttons! Use this feature to your advantage and write something compelling enough to make your participant press that button.

Change the colors, make use of the existing themes, change the fonts, add a logo. 'Coz change is the only constant!