WOM - Word of Mouth Marketing

The latest marketing trends. WOM Marketing, Guerilla Marketing, Viral Marketing and the other alternative marketing techniques.


Reputation Management

Reputation Management is a very different marketing technique from Word of Mouth Marketing.

Reputation management involves recording a person or agent's actions and the opinions of others about those actions. These records can then be published in order to allow other people (or agents) to make informed decisions about whether to trust that person or not.

A reputation management system which uses pre-programmed criteria for reputation management automates the process of encouraging cooperative behavior over selfish behavior.

Reputation management is also a definition of the objective of public relations.

WOMMA - Word of Mouth Marketing Association

WOMMA is... Word of Mouth Marketing

WOMMA is the official trade association for the word of mouth marketing industry. WOMMA's mission is to promote and improve word of mouth marketing by:

- Protecting consumers and the industry with strong ethical guidelines
- Promoting WOM as an effective marketing tool
- Setting standards to encourage its use

WOMMA members are building a prosperous word of mouth (WOM) marketing profession. Thriving markets are built on best practices, effective standards, and ethical leadership. Those are the qualities that bring WOMMA members together.

To learn more about WOMMA, just visit: http://www.womma.org

Spamdexing

Spamdexing or search engine spamming is the practice of deliberately creating web pages which will be indexed by search engines in order to increase the chance of a website or page being placed close to the beginning of search engine results, or to influence the category to which the page is assigned. Many designers of web pages try to get a good ranking in search engines and design their pages accordingly. The word is a portmanteau of spamming and indexing.

Spamdexing refers exclusively to practices that are dishonest and mislead search and indexing programs to give a page a ranking it does not deserve. "White hat" techniques for making a website indexable by search engines, without misleading the indexing process, are known as search engine optimization (SEO). SEO techniques do not involve deceit.

Search engine spammers, on the other hand, are generally aware that the content that they promote is not very useful or relevant to the ordinary internet surfer. Search engines use a variety of algorithms to determine relevancy ranking. Some of these include determining whether the search term appears in the META keywords tag, others whether the search term appears in the body text of a web page. A variety of techniques are used to spamdex (see below). Many search engines check for instances of spamdexing and will remove suspect pages from their indexes.

The rise of spamdexing in the mid-1990s made the leading search engines of the time less useful, and the success of Google at both producing better search results and combating keyword spamming, through its reputation-based PageRank link analysis system, helped it become the dominant search site late in the decade, where it remains. While it has not been rendered useless by spamdexing, Google has not been immune to more sophisticated methods either. Google bombing is another form of web vandalism, which involves creating pages that directly affect the rank of other sites.

Spamdexers may act as consultants, to help other web publishers drive up their sites' ranks using black-hat techniques. Alternatively, they may set up sites of their own that benefit from misleadingly-high rankings -- for instance, creating thousands or millions of landing pages containing links for which the spammer earns a commission whenever the user clicks.

Common spamdexing techniques can be classified into two broad classes: content spam and link spam.

Content Spam
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These techniques involve altering the logical view that a search engine has over the page's contents. They all aim at variants of the vector space model for information retrieval on text collections.

Hidden or invisible text

Disguising keywords and phrases by making them the same (or almost the same) color as the background, using a tiny font size or hiding them within the HTML code such as "no frame" sections, ALT attributes and "no script" sections. This is useful to make a page appear to be relevant for a web crawler in a way that makes it more likely to be found. Example: A promoter of a Ponzi scheme wants to attract web surfers to a site where he advertises his scam. He places hidden text appropriate for a fan page of a popular music group on his page, hoping that the page will be listed as a fan site and receive many visits from music lovers. However, hidden text is not always spamdexing: it can also be used to enhance accessibility.

Keyword stuffing

This involves the insertion of hidden, random text on a webpage to raise the keyword density or ratio of keywords to other words on the page. Older versions of indexing programs simply counted how often a keyword appeared, and used that to determine relevance levels. Most modern search engines have the ability to analyze a page for keyword stuffing and determine whether the frequency is above a "normal" level.

Meta tag stuffing

Repeating keywords in the Meta tags, and using keywords that are unrelated to the site's content.

Gateway or doorway pages

Creating low-quality web pages that contain very little content but are instead stuffed with very similar key words and phrases. They are designed to rank highly within the search results. A doorway page will generally have "click here to enter" in the middle of it.

Scraper sites

Scraper sites, also known as Made for AdSense sites, are created using various programs designed to 'scrape' search engine results pages or other sources of content and create 'content' for a website. These types of websites are generally full of advertising, or redirect the user to other sites.

Link Spam
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Link spam takes advantage of link-based ranking algorithms, such as Google's PageRank algorithm, which gives a higher ranking to a website the more other highly-ranked websites link to it. These techniques also aim at influencing other link-based ranking techniques such as the HITS algorithm.

Link farms

Involves creating tightly-knit communities of pages referencing each other, also known humorously as mutual admiration societies

Hidden links

Putting links where visitors will not see them in order to increase link popularity.

Sybil attack

This is the forging of multiple identities for malicious intent, named after the famous schizophrenia patient Shirley Ardell Mason. A spammer may create multiple web sites at different domain names that all link to each other, such as fake blogs known as spam blogs.

Spam in blogs

This is the placing or solicitation of links randomly on other sites, placing a desired keyword into the hyperlinked text of the inbound link. Guest books, forums, blogs and any site that accepts visitors comments are particular targets and are often victims of drive by spamming where automated software creates nonsense posts with links that are usually irrelevant and unwanted.

Spam blogs(also known as splogs)

A spam blog, on the contrary, is a fake blog created exclusively with the intent of spamming. They are similar in nature to link farms.

Page hijacking

Referer log spamming

When someone accesses a web page, i.e. the referee, by following a link from another web page, i.e. the referer, the referee is given the address of the referer by the person's internet browser. Some websites have a referer log which shows which pages link to that site. By having a robot randomly access many sites enough times, with a message or specific address given as the referer, that message or internet address then appears in the referer log of those sites that have referer logs. Since some search engines base the importance of sites by the number of different sites linking to them, referer-log spam may be used to increase the search engine rankings of the spammer's sites, by getting the referer logs of many sites to link to them.

Buying expired domains

Some link spammers monitor DNS records for domains that will expire soon, then buy them when they expire and replace the pages with links to their pages.

Some of these techniques may be applied for creating a Google bomb, this is, to cooperate with other users to boost the ranking of a particular page for a particular query.

Other Types of Spamdexing
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Mirror websites

Hosting of multiple websites all with the same content but using different URLs. Some search engines give a higher rank to results where the keyword searched for appears in the URL.

URL redirections

Taking the user to another page without his or her intervention, e.g. using META refresh tags, CGI scripts, Java, JavaScript, Server side redirects or server side techniques.

Cloaking refers to any of several means to serve up a different page to the search-engine spider than will be seen by human users. It can be an attempt to mislead search engines regarding the content on a particular web site. However, cloaking can also be used to ethically increase accessibility of a site to users with disabilities, or to provide human users with content that search engines aren't able to process or parse. It is also used to deliver content based on a user's location; Google itself uses IP delivery, a form of cloaking, to deliver results.

A form of this is 'code swapping, this is: optimizing a page for top ranking, then, swapping another page in its place once a top ranking is achieved.

Some useful links for webmasters:

Google's Webmaster Guidelines page
Yahoo!'s Search Engine Indexing page
MSN Search's Site Owner page

SEO and Marketing

There is a considerable sized body of practitioners of SEO who see search engines as just another visitor to a site, and try to make the site as accessible to those visitors as to any other who would come to the pages. They often see the white hat/black hat dichotomy mentioned above as a false dilemma. The focus of their work isn't primarily to rank the highest for certain terms in search engines, but rather to help site owners fullfill the business objectives of their sites. Indeed, ranking well for a few terms among the many possibilities does not guarantee more sales. A successful Internet marketing campaign may drive organic search results to pages, but it also may involve the use of paid advertising on search engines and other pages, building high quality web pages to engage and persuade, addressing technical issues that may keep search engines from crawling and indexing those sites, setting up analytics programs to enable site owners to measure their successes, and making sites accessible and usable.

SEOs may work in-house for an organization, or as consultants, and search engine optimization may be only part of their daily functions. Often their education of how search engines function come from interacting and discussing the topics on forums, through blogs, at popular conferences and seminars, and by experimentation on their own sites. There are few college courses that cover online marketing from an ecommerce perspective that can keep up with the changes that the web sees on a daily basis.

While endeavoring to meet the guidelines posted by search engines can help build a solid foundation for success on the web, such efforts are only a start. Many see search engine marketing as a larger umbrella under which search engine optimization fits, but it's possible that many who focused primarily on SEO in the past are incorporating more and more marketing ideas into their efforts, including public relations strategy and implementation, online display media buying, web site transition SEO, web trends data anaylsis, HTML E-mail campaigns, and business blog consulting making SEO firms more like an ad agency.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of methods aimed at improving the ranking of a website in search engine listings, and could be considered a subset of search engine marketing. The term SEO also refers to "search engine optimizers," an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients' sites. Some commentators, and even some SEOs, break down methods used by practitioners into categories such as "white hat SEO" (methods generally approved by search engines, such as building content and improving site quality), or "black hat SEO" (tricks such as cloaking and spamdexing). White hatters say that black hat methods are an attempt to manipulate search rankings unfairly. Black hatters counter that all SEO is an attempt to manipulate rankings, and that the particular methods one uses to rank well are irrelevant.

Search engines display different kinds of listings in the search engine results pages (SERPs), including: pay per click advertisements, paid inclusion listings, and organic search results. SEO is primarily concerned with advancing the goals of a website by improving the number and position of its organic search results for a wide variety of relevant keywords. SEO strategies may increase both the number and quality of visitors. Search engine optimization is sometimes offered as a stand-alone service, or as a part of a larger marketing effort, and can often be very effective when incorporated into the initial development and design of a site.

For competitive, high-volume search terms, the cost of pay per click advertising can be substantial. Ranking well in the organic search results can provide the same targeted traffic at a potentially significant savings. Site owners may choose to optimize their sites for organic search, if the cost of optimization is less than the cost of advertising.

Not all sites have identical goals for search optimization. Some sites seek any and all traffic, and may be optimized to rank highly for common search phrases. A broad search optimization strategy can work for a site that has broad interest, such as a periodical, a directory, or site that displays advertising with a CPM revenue model. In contrast, many businesses try to optimize their sites for large numbers of highly specific keywords that indicate readiness to buy. Overly broad search optimization can hinder marketing strategy by generating a large volume of low-quality inquiries that cost money to handle, yet result in little business. Focusing on desirable traffic generates better quality sales leads, resulting in more sales. Search engine optimization can be very effective when used as part of a smart niche marketing strategy.

Early search engines

Webmasters and content providers began optimizing sites for search engines in the mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloging the early Web. Initially, all a webmaster needed to do was submit a site to the various engines which would run spiders, programs to "crawl" the site, and store the collected data. The default search-bracket was to scan an entire webpage for so-called related search words, so a page with many different words matched more searches, and a webpage containing a dictionary-type listing would match almost all searches, limited only by unique names. The search engines then sorted the information by topic, and served results based on pages they had crawled. As the number of documents online kept growing, and more webmasters realized the value of organic search listings, some popular search engines began to sort their listings so they could display the most relevant pages first. This was the start of a friction between search engine and webmasters that continues to this day.

At first search engines were guided by the webmasters themselves. Early versions of search algorithms relied on webmaster-provided information such as category and keyword meta tags, or index files in engines like ALIWEB. Meta-tags provided a guide to each page's content. When some webmasters began to abuse meta tags, causing their pages to rank for irrelevant searches, search engines abandoned their consideration of meta tags and instead developed more complex ranking algorithms, taking into account factors that elevated a limited number of words (anti-dictionary) and were more diverse, including:

- Text within the title tag
- Domain name
- URL directories and file names
- HTML tags: headings, emphasized and strongly emphasized text
- Term frequency, both in the document and globally, often misunderstood and mistakenly referred to as Keyword density
- Keyword proximity
- Keyword adjacency
- Keyword sequence
- Alt attributes for images
- Text within NOFRAMES tags
- Content development

Pringle, et al. (Pringle et al., 1998), also defined a number of attributes within the HTML source of a page which were often manipulated by web content providers attempting to rank well in search engines. But by relying so extensively on factors that were still within the webmasters' exclusive control, search engines continued to suffer from abuse and ranking manipulation. In order to provide better results to their users, search engines had to adapt to ensure their SERPs showed the most relevant search results, rather than useless pages stuffed with numerous keywords by unscrupulous webmasters using a bait-and-switch lure to display unrelated webpages. This led to the rise of a new kind of search engine.

Development of more sophisticated ranking algorithms

Google was started by two PhD students at Stanford University, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and brought a new concept to evaluating web pages. This concept, called PageRank, has been important to the Google algorithm from the start. PageRank relies heavily on incoming links and uses the logic that each link to a page is a vote for that page's value. The more incoming links a page had the more "worthy" it is. The value of each incoming link itself varies directly based on the PageRank of the page it comes from and inversely on the number of outgoing links on that page.

With help from PageRank technology, Google proved to be very good at serving relevant search results. Google quickly became the most popular and successful search engine. Because PageRank measured an off-site factor, Google felt it would be more difficult to manipulate than on-page factors.

However, webmasters had already developed link building tools and schemes to influence the Inktomi search engine. These methods proved to be equally applicable to Google's algorithm. Many sites focused on exchanging, buying, and selling links on a massive scale. PageRank's reliance on the link as a vote of confidence in a page's value was undermined as many webmasters sought to garner links purely to influence Google into sending them more traffic, irrespective of whether the link was useful to human site visitors.

Further complicating the situation, the default search-bracket was still to scan an entire webpage for so-called related search-words, and a webpage containing a dictionary-type listing would still match almost all searches (except special names) at an even higher priority given by link-rank. Dictionary pages and link schemes could severely skew search results.

It was time for Google — and other search engines — to look at a wider range of off-site factors. There were other reasons to develop more intelligent algorithms. The Internet was reaching a vast population of non-technical users who were often unable to use advanced querying techniques to reach the information they were seeking and the sheer volume and complexity of the indexed data was vastly different from that of the early days. Search engines had to develop predictive, semantic, linguistic and heuristic algorithms. Around the same time as the work that led to Google, IBM had begun work on the Clever Project, and Jon Kleinberg was developing the HITS algorithm.

A proxy for the PageRank metric is still displayed in the Google Toolbar, though the displayed value is rounded to be an integer, and the data updated infrequently, so it is likely to be outdated. For these reasons, and the fact that PageRank is only one of more than 100 "signals" that Google considers in ranking pages, experienced SEOs recommend ignoring the displayed PageRank.

Today, most search engines keep their methods and ranking algorithms secret, to compete for finding the most valuable search-results and to deter spam pages from clogging those results. A search engine may use hundreds of factors in ranking the listings on its SERPs; the factors themselves and the weight each carries may change continually. Algorithms can differ widely: a webpage that ranks #1 in a particular search engine could rank #200 in another search engine.

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft do not disclose the algorithms they use to rank pages. Some SEOs have carried out controlled experiments to gauge the effects of different approaches to search optimization. Based on these experiments, often shared through online forums and blogs, professional SEOs form a consensus on what methods work best.

SEOs widely agree that the top signals that influence a page's rankings include:

- Keywords in the title tag.
- Keywords in links pointing to the page.
- Keywords appearing in visible text.
- Link popularity (PageRank for Google) of the page.

In addition, there are many other signals that can affect a page's ranking.

The relationship between SEO and the search engines

The first mentions of Search Engine Optimization don't appear on Usenet until 1997, a few years after the launch of the first Internet search engines. The operators of search engines recognized quickly that some people from the webmaster community were making efforts to rank well in their search engines, and even manipulating the page rankings in search results. In some early search engines, such as Infoseek, ranking first was as easy as grabbing the source code of the top-ranked page, placing it on your website, and submitting a URL to instantly index and rank that page.

Due to the high value and targeting of search results, there is potential for an adversarial relationship between search engines and SEOs. In 2005, an annual conference named AirWeb was created to discuss bridging the gap and minimizing the sometimes damaging effects of aggressive web content providers.

Some more aggressive site owners and SEOs generate automated sites or employ techniques that eventually get domains banned from the search engines. Many search engine optimization companies, which sell services, employ long-term, low-risk strategies, and most SEO firms that do employ high-risk strategies do so on their own affiliate, lead-generation, or content sites, instead of risking client websites.

Some SEO companies employ aggressive techniques that get their client websites banned from the search results. The Wall Street Journal profiled a company that allegedly used high-risk techniques and failed to disclose those risks to its clients. Wired reported the same company sued a blogger for mentioning that they were banned. Google's Matt Cutts later confirmed that Google did in fact ban Traffic Power and some of its clients.

Google has enforced webpage restrictions for years, such as for hidden-text (background and foreground colors the same hue); in 2006, Google could punish a non-standard website by blocking search-results, automatically, the next day for 30-35 days (or longer), pending a reinclusion request, and if reinstated, revert the index to old/expired/deleted webpages from a year earlier, delaying the re-indexing of the current website for a total of 2-4 months.

Yahoo! and MSN Search do not automatically punish entire websites for small amounts of hidden text.[citation needed] Google's market share of daily searches has fallen rapidly from 75% to 56% over the past few years, as other search engines find many webpages that Google has banned and cannot display due to Google's severely limited index.[citation needed] In early 2006, MSN Search typically re-indexed small websites every 14 days, and Yahoo! also re-indexed quickly, much faster than Google, but all three MSN/Yahoo!/Google could require more than a month to index a new page (new file name) on an old website.

Some search engines have also reached out to the SEO industry, and are frequent sponsors and guests at SEO conferences and seminars. In fact, with the advent of paid inclusion, some search engines now have a vested interest in the health of the optimization community. All of the main search engines provide information/guidelines to help with site optimization: Google's, Yahoo!'s, MSN's and Ask.com's. Google has a Sitemaps program to help webmasters learn if Google is having any problems indexing their website and also provides data on Google traffic to the website. Yahoo! has SiteExplorer that provides a way to submit your URLs for free (like MSN/Google), determine how many pages are in the Yahoo! index and drill down on inlinks to deep pages. Yahoo! has an Ambassador Program and Google has a program for qualifying Google Advertising Professionals.

Getting into search engines' listings

New sites do not need to be "submitted" to search engines to be listed. However, Google and Yahoo offer a submission program such as Google Sitemaps that an XML type feed could be created and submitted. Generally however, a simple link from an established site will get the search engines to visit the new site and begin to spider its contents. It can take a few days or even weeks from the acquisition of a link from such an established site for all the main search engine spiders to commence visiting and indexing the new site.

Once the search engine has found the new site, it will generally visit and start to index the pages on the site, as long as all the pages are linked to with anchor tag hyperlinks. Pages which are accessible only through Flash or Javascript links may not be findable by the spiders.

Search engine crawlers may look at a number of different factors when crawling a site, and many pages from a site may not be indexed by the search engines until they gain more pagerank or links or traffic. Distance of pages from the root directory of a site may also be a factor in whether or not pages get crawled, as well as other importance metrics. Cho et al. (Cho et al., 1998) described some standards for those decisons as to which pages are visited and sent by a crawler to be included in a search engine's index.

Webmasters can instruct spiders to not index certain files or directories through the standard robots.txt file in the root directory of the domain. Standard practice requires a search engine to check this file upon visiting the domain, though a search engine crawler will keep a cached copy of this file as it visits the pages of a site, and may not update that copy as quickly as a webmaster does. The web developer can use this feature to prevent pages such as shopping carts or other dynamic, user-specific content from appearing in search engine results, as well as keeping spiders from endless loops and other spider traps.

For those search engines who have their own paid submission (like Yahoo!), it may save some time to pay a nominal fee for submission. Yahoo!'s paid submission program guarantees inclusion in their search results, but does not guarantee specific ranking within the search results.

White hat methods

White hat methods of SEO involve following the search engines' guidelines as to what is and what isn't acceptable. Their advice generally is to create content for the user, not for the search engines; to make that content easily accessible to their spiders; and to not try to game the system. Often, webmasters make critical mistakes when designing or setting up their websites, inadvertently "poisoning" them so that they will not rank well. White hat SEOs attempt to discover and correct mistakes, such as machine-unreadable menus, broken links, temporary redirects, or a poor navigation structure.

Because search engines are text-centric, many of the same methods that are useful for web accessibility are also advantageous for SEO. A detailed case for this common ground, cited by the W3C with respect to Developing a Web Accessibility Business Case, is SEO A Positive Influence on Web Accessibility. Google has brought the relationship between SEO and accessibility even closer with the release of Google Accessible Web Search which prioritises accessible websites.

Methods are available for optimizing graphical content, including ALT attributes, and adding a text caption. Even Flash animations can be optimized by designing the page to include alternative content in case the visitor cannot read Flash.

Some methods considered proper by the search engines:

- Using unique and relevant title to name each page.
- Editing web pages to replace vague wording with specific terminology relevant to the subject of the page, and that the audiences that the site was developed for will expect to see on the pages, and will search with to find the page.
- Increasing the amount of unique content on the site.
- Writing quality content for the website visitors instead of the search engines.
- Using a reasonably-sized, accurate description meta tag without excessive use of keywords, exclamation marks or off topic terms.
- Ensuring that all pages are accessible via anchor tag hyperlinks, and not only via - Java, Javascript or Macromedia Flash applications or meta refresh redirection; this can be done through the use of text-based links in site navigation and also via a page listing all the contents of the site (a site map).
- Allowing search engine spiders to crawl pages without having to accept session IDs or cookies.
- Developing "link bait" strategies. High quality websites that offer interesting content or novel features tend to accumulate large numbers of backlinks.
- Participating in a web ring with other quality websites.
- Writing useful, informational articles under a Creative Commons or other open source license, in exchange for attribution to the author by hyperlink.

Black hat methods

"Black hat" SEO are methods to try to improve rankings which are disapproved of by the search engines, typically because they consider such methods deceptive, and unrelated to providing quality content to site visitors. Search engines often penalize sites they discover using black hat methods, by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from the SERPs altogether. Such penalties are usually applied automatically by the search engines' algorithms, because the Internet is too large to make manual policing of websites feasible.

Spamdexing is the promotion of irrelevant, chiefly commercial, pages through deceptive techniques and the abuse of the search algorithms. Over time a widespread consensus has developed in the industry as to what are and are not acceptable means of boosting one's search engine placement and resultant traffic.

Spamdexing often gets confused with white hat search engine optimization techniques, which do not involve deceit. Spamming involves getting websites more exposure than they deserve for their keywords, leading to unsatisfactory search results. Optimization involves getting websites the rank they deserve on the most targeted keywords, leading to satisfactory search experiences.

When discovered, search engines may take action against those found to be using unethical SEO methods. In February 2006, Google removed both BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany for use of these practices.

Cloaking is the practice of serving one version of a page to search engine spiders/bots and another version to human visitors.

Legal issues

In 2002, SearchKing filed suit in an Oklahoma court against the search engine Google. SearchKing's claim was that Google's tactics to prevent spamdexing constituted an unfair business practice. This may be compared to lawsuits which email spammers have filed against spam-fighters, as in various cases against MAPS and other DNSBLs. In January of 2003, the court pronounced a summary judgment in Google's favor.

New Media Marketing

New Media Marketing is a relatively new concept utilized by businesses in developing an online community, which allows customer evangelists to congregate and extol the virtues of a particular brand. In most cases, the online community includes mechanisms such as blogs, podcasts, message boards, and product reviews, all of which contribute to a transparent forum to post praises, criticisms, questions, and suggestions.

One of the primary arguments to promote New Media Marketing is the premise that traditional advertising is losing its influence on consumers. Backed by statistical evidence demonstrating a growing trend of consumers making purchasing decisions off Internet research and referrals, outspoken New Media Marketing advocates such as Shel Israel, Joseph Jaffe, and Seth Godin argue for non-traditional methods that encompass word-of-mouth tactics and blogging applications. These advocates strongly adhere to the notion that consumers are more inclined to believe feedback from like-minded peers than corporate marketing verbiage dispersed through traditional television, radio, direct mail, or newspaper advertising.

Although businesses would be exposing certain weaknesses to the marketplace by allowing individuals, or even competitors, to post critical comments, responding with an honest and transparent answer designed around solving the issue at hand may mitigate potential risks.

Often referred by traditional advertising methods, New Media Marketing is most effectively marketed by Internet-driven technology such as RSS, email forwards, search engine optimization, and reciprocal links.

Viral Marketing

Viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that seek to exploit pre-existing social networks to produce exponential increases in brand awareness, through viral processes similar to the spread of an epidemic. It can often be word-of-mouth delivered and enhanced online; it can harness the network effect of the Internet and can be very useful in reaching a large number of people rapidly.

Viral marketing is sometimes used to describe some sorts of Internet-based stealth marketing campaigns, including the use of blogs, seemingly amateur web sites, and other forms of astroturfing to create word of mouth for a new product or service. Often the ultimate goal of viral marketing campaigns is to generate media coverage via "offbeat" stories worth many times more than the campaigning company's advertising budget.

The term "viral advertising" refers to the idea that people will pass on and share interesting and entertaining content; this is often sponsored by a brand, which is looking to build awareness of a product or service. These viral commercials often take the form of funny video clips, or interactive Flash games, images, and even text.

Viral marketing is popular because of the ease of executing the marketing campaign, relative low-cost (compared to direct mail), good targeting, and the high and rapid response rate. The main strength of viral marketing is its ability to obtain a large number of interested people at a low cost.

The most difficult task for any company is to acquire and retain a large customer base. Through the use of the internet and the effects of e-mail advertising, the business-to-consumer (B2C) efforts have a greater impact than many other tools of marketing. Viral marketing is a technique that avoids the annoyance of spam mail; it encourages users of a specific product or service to tell a friend. This would be a positive word-of-mouth recommendation. One of the most successful perspectives found to achieve this customer base is the integrated marketing communication IMC perspective.