Viral Marketing and The Genius Of Seth Godin

Most recently I stumbled upon an exclusive interview that Guy Kawasaki did with Darren Rowse for Sun.com.

If you had been a blogger, Marketer you may have heard about Seth Godin and his philosophy of not having comments on his blog.

Moderating comments is a painful task. Given Seth??™s celebrity status, its natural of him to attract a voluminous amount of them on a daily basis. That is understandable.

What caught me thinking was Darren??™s explanation on how Seth made his blog Viral by restricting comments.

People who read Seth??™s blog and want to make comments are forced to write about them in their own blog resulting in More track backs, back links, readership for Seth. The evidence: Seth has a lot of blogs linking to his posts in technorati.

You can read the complete interview here

The term viral marketing was first coined in 1996 by Harvard Business School professor, Jeffrey F. Rayport. By definition, viral marketing refers to unique marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to increase product or brand awareness through the process of self-replicating. It??™s comparable to how pathological viruses are spread through the body, or how a destructive electronic virus is spread from computer to computer. Is the evolution of viral marketing the ultimate example of good conquering evil? (Sure, if your advertising is considered a greater form of good)

The concept of viral marketing is actually much older than recent Internet-created phenomenon. The most famous examples of viral marketing may include mentions of Hotmail or even the Blair Witch Project film in 1999. It is clear that film studios, television networks and advertising companies are investing more in creative viral marketing.

Websites such as FaceBook.com, YouTube.com and MySpace.com have also made good use of viral marketing by merging the model with social networking. One of the most recent examples of a successful viral marketing campaign is director Christopher Nolan??™s film, The Dark Knight. This campaign has seen the combination of online and real-life elements in order to simulate an alternate reality game. There have been numerous websites created to highlight the fictional ???Gotham City???, as well as staged events around the world featuring mass gatherings of Joker fans and scavenger hunts. As more and more people get their news from online sources, you can bet that viral marketing will continue to be a major part of a full marketing campaign.

Have you ever considered using a viral marketing campaign to your advantage? If your potential customers are Internet-savvy, and if you can come up with a creative idea to exploit social networking, then it may be an outside-the-box solution that could pay off.