I admit it. The term 'viral marketing' is offensive. Call yourself a Viral Marketer and people will take two steps back. I would. 'Do they have a vaccine for that yet?' you wonder. A sinister thing, the simple virus is fraught with doom, not quite dead yet not fully alive, it exists in that nether genre somewhere between disaster movies and horror flicks. But you have to admire the virus. He has a way of living in secrecy until he is so numerous that he wins by sheer weight of numbers. He piggybacks on other hosts and uses their resources to increase his tribe. And in the right environment, he grows exponentially. A virus doesn't even have to mate-he just replicates, again and again with geometrically increasing power, doubling with each iteration."

Hand it to him-he had you reading, right? It's Ralph Wilson. He wrote all that originally for the online journal Web Marketing Today. Is it copyright protected? It had better not be, because it's a virus in itself-and Wilson will presumably be pleased at how infectious his words are.

Viral marketing, if it's not already clear, refers to the individual-to-individual transmission of a message, with the capacity to spread so exponentially fast as to turn into a mega-phenomenon. The term was first coined, according to one web version, in 1997 by Steve Jurvetson, a venture capitalist, to describe Hotmail's strategy of tagging every mail with an ad soliciting new users for its service. It's what made Hotmail the mega-success it is. Napster and others used it too, though the term now is used more often to describe a sort of internet word-of-mouth wave.

According to Seth Godin, author of Unleashing The Ideavirus, "The future belongs to marketers who establish a foundation and process where interested people can market to each other. Ignite consumer networks and then get out of the way and let them talk." Of course, any smart marketer would want a role in crafting the core communication that goes on, even amongst free individuals talking to one another. A message that has the fastest viral power, typically, is one that is short, simple and singable. Know anybody immune to that?