Business Today Net Special

Internet's Friendly Bug

Viral marketing is allowing marketers to communicate at low-costs, with high rate of effectiveness.

By Rakhi Mazumdar

Wouldn't it be great if your customers were also your marketers? It sure would be. And luckily for companies, the internet is turning that wish into a reality. It's called viral marketing. You may not have heard about it, but you certainly have seen it in your inbox: e-flyers that urge you to forward them to as many people as you can. The benefits of viral marketing are simple: one, it lowers the cost of e-mail address acquisition (yes, they pay to get your e-addresses), and two it maximises the reach of communication.

Off-line, viral marketing goes under the name of "word-of-mouth" marketing or simply "buzz marketing". But what makes viral marketing so potent on-line is the medium's speed and span. Says Vishal Kondal, CEO, indiagames.com: "Our site has flourished entirely on word-of-mouth marketing." Over two months after the Kargil war last year, indiagames.com recorded 2,00,000 downloads of its game "I Love India" based purely on viral marketing.

This is good news for marketers at a time when consumers seem tired of banner ads. A recent A.C. Nielsen report says that it is mostly children aged 2-11 years who click on banner ads. Small wonder, then, that opinion sites such as citizenbharat.com and apnaguide.com are all taking advantage of their customers' knowledge to bring new business into the fold. Others, including Mumbai-based customerpowernyou.com do not plan to sell anything themselves; instead, they would provide links to top e-Commerce sites, aiming to help the consumer find product reviews, price-shop and, finally, buy.

The most famous viral marketing story in the internet folklore is Hotmail.com's---one of the first free Web-based e-mail services. The idea came from Tim Draper (of VeeCee firm Draper Fischer Jurvetson), who gave a suggestion to Hotmail's co-founder Sabeer Bhatia that they append an advertising message to every outbound e-mail: "Get your private, free e-mail at http://Hotmail.com." This was an advertisement and a subtle, implied endorsement by the sender. Without spending any money Hotmail gained over three times as many users in half the time than its nearest rival Juno did.

Perhaps, the most important factor that works for viral marketing on the internet is the ease and convenience with which a referral can be converted into a trial. Clearly, not all bugs are bad.

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