viral media : what, why, how, and can it work in edu

Viral Marketing encourages the user to send it to others via social networks. The crudest form of this is chain letters where a message at the bottom of the e-mail prompts the reader to forward the message. More effective are short, funny clips of video which people spontaneously forward. Many of these, such as the Cog (television commercial) from Honda began life as TV commercials and have since circulated on the web by word of mouth. The number of people reached in this way is often much greater than the number who viewed the original ad.

According to Jochai Benchler, in book The Wealth of Networks, systems which relay on user generated content tend to be driven by teens and young adults with few economic commitments and a long time horizon for earning and saving, on the one hand, and high social recognition needs on the other. As active members of these communities the psychology of our information sharing breaks down thusly: we talk to connect (the homophily principle: people cluster with sames); we talk because we are programmed to do so; we talk to make sense of the world; we talk to reduce risk; we talk to reduce risk; we talk to relive tension; we talk to because it makes economic sense. Factors determining the degree of sharing include: customers emotional involvement in a brand as well as issues of privacy (people have been obseved not to be comfortable discussing financial and health care services, for example).

In a Group as User: Flaming and the Design of Social Software, Clay Shirky notes that in the case of mailing lists, which were the first widely available piece of social software to be analyzed as virtual communities "flame wars where the most reliable features of mailing list practice". For a long time there was a general belief that if a customer had a good experience with a product he would tell 3 people but if he had a bad experience he would tell 7. Coca Cola did a survey of 1,700 customers who had complained about the brand and found confirmation of this marketing myth. Subsequent research found dissatisfied customers of online services are as much as 4-times more likely to discuss their negative experience in online chat rooms. In another article, Shirky concludes, that far from eliminating the need to deliver on promises, this type of marketing actually makes businesses more dependent on the goodwill of their users.