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.