How to Use Social Websites for Viral Marketing
Social web sites like MySpace and facebook are perfect venues for what's known as "viral marketing." According to those who practice this new art, viral marketing is about an emotional appeal, getting to people through dramatic use of words, and putting product or marketing associations into a social or explosive context. Social websites facilitate this by offering an easy setup that looks "personal," a profile and other accessories can be easily used for viral marketing. Read on to learn more.
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Instructions
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Create a profile for a character that will advance the marketing concept by "loving" or "hating" the product, or by including it in his/her life. The profile will look intensely personal through association, but may in fact be a blend of clever marketing and artificial persona.
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Work your message into blog entries. As the character goes through his/her inner process, include notes regarding whatever your marketing concept is without breaking the stream-of-consciousness quality that readers expect in a blog entry.
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Use naming. Creating clever name associations in your profile, images, blog entries, or social contact lists can get a subtle message to readers. Mimicking branding through "friend phonetics" (example: Daritas, Geeco or Stirbecks) can have an effect, although the precise effect would be hard to predict. A less blatant approach will probably yield better results.
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Link up to marketing sites. Use social contact links, topic links or bio links to direct the reader to something off-topic from the profile. Find specific "destination sites" and facilitate the reader's easy access to them through cleverly named links.
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Associate your marketing text with what is around it. Use the visual and auditory possibilities of the social networking sites to your advantage with large-scale images surrounding your viral marketing text or sound clips containing target messages. The adroit use of image and text is part of any good web creation, and even more important in social networking sites.
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Comments
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Bearie23
Sep 14, 2010
This article is a little out of date because it does not even mention Facebook or Twitter. -
Miragi
Oct 15, 2008
So, in essence, just be a fraud? Viral marketing is about being real, and passing information from one REAL person to another, not by deceiving people with a fake profile. There's enough fraud and deceipt in typical marketing. This is disappointing.
