It's difficult to find an authoritative definition of the words "viral marketing," and that may be part of the problem with it. Viral marketing has become somewhat of a buzzword phrase, and people's understanding of it is generally poor. Like numerous other popular marketing phenomena, viral marketing quickly becomes dilluted through misinterpretation. Don't be surprised if you run across incorrect use of these words, particularly from people selling turnkey marketing solutions. I haven't run across the words "guaranteed to go viral" yet, but I'm sure it's only a matter of time.

So, I'll make my best effort to clear this up here. This article should give you a good idea of what viral marketing is, and the basic idea behind it. It should also give you the ability to look at a marketing opportunity and get a realistic idea whether it has the potential to become "viral" or not. Here are two characteristics of any marketing that can legitimately call itself viral.

1. Viral marketing must spread from person to person voluntarily.
2. Viral marketing must be self-sustaining. In other words, a viral message will continue to spread without any continued effort to promote it on the part of the originator.
3. A person who spreads a viral message must do so without any financial incentive to do so. If the people spreading the message are being paid to sell something, it's not viral marketing.

A televison or radio ad is not a viral campaign, nor is any form of mass-media advertising that blasts a broadcast message at a large number of people simultaneously. It's sometimes said that viral marketing is the same as word of mouth advertising. One could argue semantics and split hairs about this, but there's scarcely any point. Let's just say that word of mouth advertising is undisputably the oldest form of viral marketing, and that there are some other, newer forms as well. You can pay for advertising a message, and that message may become viral as a result, but no form of paid advertising itself is a form of viral marketing.

Viral marketing tends to start out small. It often stays that way for years before anyone hears of them. For example, Amazon.com started in 1994, but if you asked someone on the street about them, you would have most likely gotten a blank stare until at 1996 or so. Viral marketing is not a "linear" process; it's an exponential curve. In other words, nothing happens for a long time, and then things snap into place. After that point, an explosion occurs and everybody jumps on the bandwagon.

Viral marketing usually gives an intrinsic incentive for spreading the message. Seth Godin remarks numerous times throughout his books that a fax machine would be worthless if nobody owned one but you. Different variations on this principle typically apply to virally marketed products or services. Social networking sites are a great example of this. The potential and possibilities for interaction on these sites multiply exponentially if your friends are on them, too. In other words, the utility of a viral product increases when others in your center of influence use it along with you. This is not strictly necessary for a marketing campaign to be viral, but it helps a lot.

So, that's viral marketing in a nutshell. And as you can see, it has its drawbacks.

There are plenty of good examples of how viral marketing works well over the long term, but it takes a long time and a lot of up-front investment to create the kind of buzz that spreads on its own. See my other hub for examples of this. But first, understand that viral marketing needs a renewable supply of fresh demand in order to keep working indefinitely. Since viral marketing happens when people start to talk about something, it depends heavily on novelty. Novelty has a short shelf-life. For this reason, viral marketing most often fizzles out quickly after people's attention span reaches its limits and life goes on.

To get people's attention a second time, you'll need either a new message, or a new set of people who haven't heard the original message. Both of these are possible, of course, but it's not as easy as you think. In order for either of these conditions to be fulfilled, you'll need to build up a base of long-term messengers. So, if you want to virally market a product, you'll need long-term users who are enthusiastically satisfied with the product, and who happily tell their friends about it for years, just because they know that their friends will be satisfied with it as well. This won't happen if your product is a commodity. Soon, somebody else will make the same thing, and people will buy that instead (unless yours is cheaper). And people don't get enthusiastic about products just because they're cheap.

Sustainable viral marketing depends on three critical variables. The incubation period of the message, the scope of the target audience (people who would be excited to hear about it), and the variety of new forms the same idea could take on. If the message has universal appeal and delivers an instant payoff, the message will have a short incubation period. You'll tell your friends about it, they'll tell their friends, and the whole world will know. Then, life will go on and it's game over. An example of this happens every time there's a new Hollywood scandal. The appeal isn't quite universal, but it's close enough that it doesn't matter. The instant payoff happens for the people who get vicarious thrills from spreading dirt on the people who's lives they wish they had. Then, the thrill's over and it's back to reality.

However, if the message is about something costly or risky, people will hesitate. It will appeal only to the early adopters. They'll try it out for awhile, and if it works, they'll start to spread the word. This is an example of a longer incubation period and a selective appeal, and this has a fighting chance of going viral. However, it will take a lot of priming the pump to get it going. An example of this was the GPS unit. They needed some enthusiastic tech-heads to work out the bugs with the new models, but then they started to catch on later. And even now, a lot of people still don't have them. There's a fresh demand for them all the time. And as soon as they come out with a new kind of GPS unit that does something new and useful that the old ones don't do, people will be telling their friends about those, too.

But, for every example of a trend that catches on and sticks, there are plenty of stories of fads that came and went. Viral marketing doesn't change human nature.

As the old saying goes, be careful what you wish for. Putting out a message and having it go viral can be as much a liability as an asset. The basic idea of viral marketing is that people are talking about you. That can be a great thing, but you're also at the mercy of the other people doing the talking. This can be really dangerous if the body of people doing the most talking about you are saying things that you wouldn't want them to say. This can be counter-productive to your branding efforts.

I'm not just talking about obvious things like slander and defamation. Those can be dealt with, and in most cases, they work in your favor anyway. What I'm talking about is people talking favorably about your product or service, and selling people on an idea that you had no intention of putting out there. Worse yet, people talking favorably about you might act in an unprofessional manner, and someone who encounters them might think that they represent you. You're the one who's going to look bad if this happens.

Companies have tried to create viral marketing by using affiliate marketing programs. Like I said before, this isn't viral marketing in itself, but it does lead to some viral buzz, and that's not always a good thing. The picture can get ugly when you start tying financial incentives into the picture. For example, I blog regularly using the SquareSpace platform. My affiliate link is SquareSpaceBlog.com. Since their service is typically used for blogs, I'm not misrepresenting their brand name by doing this. However, I could just as easily have registered the domain name "SquareSpaceKiddiePornBlog.com" if I wanted. Now, imagine if you'd never heard of SquareSpace before, and the link I just mentioned was your first exposure to it. What would you think SquareSpace does? This is a ridiculous example, but it has more subtle variations.

Look at Renegade University. Mike Klingler put together a training package intended to help network marketing professionals use Web 2.0 to brand themselves. Some of his affiliates, as Eric Graudins points out, have taken to creating worthless spam, cutting and pasting advertisements with their affiliate links on them. They've created the impression that Renegade University encourages and teaches this behavior, even though they actually teach the opposite. This is an example of how viral buzz can create a bad image of you. Lesson learned: if you're going to pay people to represent you, be picky about who you put on your team. Don't give anybody the impression that they can make easy money just by telling people about your service. You'll get a herd of spammers blasting the internet with messages about how easy it is to make money from telling people about your service, and you'll soon join the ranks of the swampland-in-Florida crowd.

Finally, keep in mind that one of the three core elements of sustainable viral marketing is the number of variations it can take. How many different forms could your product or service take? What are the different ways it could be used? Do you approve of them all? Are there ways that it could be used inappropriately? If you start spreading the word about it, do you have controls in place to contain the damage if people start to associate your name with these things? Think about the full consequences before lighting the match. Are you really prepared to deal with a viral message in your name that you no longer have the ability to control?

There's a sucker born every minute, as they say, and viral marketers know how to get suckers spreading the word. It's easy to get desperate people worked up into an emotional frenzy, particularly if you can play on the guilt of a parent who hasn't spent much time with their kids and hopes to buy back their children's love with a shiny new toy. Tickle-Me Elmo dolls and Cabbage Patch Kids were great for this. I'm not sure how they did it, exactly, but it's clear that the kids were all talking about them, and that the kids all wanted one. People were paying thousands of dollars for dolls that normally sold for less than $100. I read a newspaper article about someone who had bought a dozen of the dolls at $1,500 apiece, hoping to resell them and double his investment. Instead, he ended up with some useless dolls.

Viral marketing is to blame for this nonsense, but as with any other scam, it's usually the victim's own fault. But the implications can be dangerous to the economy at large when things like this happen and appear to be sustainable. For example, look at the telecom bubble that happened in the late 90's. People started to talk about it in a big way. Technology and the internet were going to keep generating prosperity without end. Economists theorized that there would be no more boom-and-bust cycles. Since this delivered an instant payoff and encouraged fiscal recklessness, it spread like wildfire. People were happy to buy bigger houses and boats, and tell their friends all about it. Banks were happy to loan them the money to do it.

But, just like Tickle-Me Elmo dolls, this fad ran out of fuel. Unfortunately for the world economy, this viral message had a longer incubation period and took longer to exhaust the demand that was fueling it. It took several years of continual over-investment in weak areas before companies finally started to wake up and see that the returns they anticipated weren't actually going to happen. By that point, we were at the top of the wave, and society was already happily addicted to the short-lived prosperity that they would soon be learning to live without.

Unfortunately, this sort of thing is all too common. People don't want to make a consistent effort and work hard over an extended period of time. People want to do something quick and easy, and become overnight millionaires. That's why you'll find page after page of "cash generating systems" and other such garbage on the Internet. It's out there because people are still dumb enough to fall for it. You'd think that after all the get-rich-quick schemes that people have lost thousands of dollars on over the years, that the industry would have collapsed on itself by now. But if you can find a way to repackage a get-rich-quick scheme in such a way that's new and sounds feasible, people will still flock to buy it from you. That's because messages about products and services that promise an instant payoff are more likely to go viral than ones that don't.

That's another thing to consider about using viral marketing. If it really does work, who are you attracting by using it? And are you really doing them a favor? I'm not saying that the answer is always "no," but do think carefully about this.

If you sell a product or service and you've been debating about whether you could use viral marketing to sell it, the answer is probably no. Just going by the law of averages, if it really were a product that loaned itself to viral marketing, you wouldn't be asking that question. Instead, you'd be wondering why everybody isn't already using it. You may have happened upon a gold mine that nobody else has recognized, but the odds are that things are more complicated than you thought. For something to truly go viral, it has to be worth talking about. And most conventional products and services just aren't that interesting.

If you sell cars, insurance, t-shirts, protein shakes, or any other commodity, put your customer hat on. Is there anything that would get you so excited about this type of product that you'd be on the phone telling your friends about it, blogging about it, and shouting it from the mountaintops? You might stumble across a neat web site and tell a few people about it every now and then, but this isn't enough to make anything go viral. A product that's basically the same as its competition, but a little better, isn't going to excite anybody and has no chance of going viral.

Here's the thing to understand about viral marketing. In order for a message to spread itself like a fire spreads itself, someone has to have a reason to want to tell their friends about it. If you think that having a low price is going to do that, think again. If you think that bribing people with financial incentives is going to make your product line go viral, think of a new plan. There needs to be some form of social utility. In other words, the intrinsic value of the product needs to increase when your friends start using it with you.

If you're in network marketing, you may have been told at some point that network marketing is built on word of mouth advertising. Wrong. Network marketing is built on direct commission selling with a residual incentive to recruit other salespeople. If your company wasn't paying you to sell your products, would you be telling all of your friends about them? If you've had to confront some fear about picking up the phone to call people you haven't spoken to in awhile to tell them about your network marketing business, would you have gone to the trouble if someone wasn't paying you? In most cases, the answer is no. If the answer is no, your products aren't viral products.

If you think that your compensation plan is so exciting that everyone will want to be part of it, think again. That only works after you're making a lot of money. Can you honestly call your friends and say, "I'm making $20,000 a month! Do you want to know how I did it?" If you're at that place in your business, you may well create viral buzz about your opportunity. But you'll also be a lot less motivated to do so. If you're making zero dollars a month and are banking on spreading the buzz about somebody else's success story, don't hold your breath. It's been tried many times.

If you want to market something virally, first create a message that's worth spreading. Until then, don't waste your breath.

You may have read The Secret by Rhonda Byrne, or knew someone that did. All of a sudden, people were talking about the Law of Attraction as if it were something new. People flocked to this book in desperation, as if it contained the answers to their immediate financial crises, or the way to find a new romantic partner that would finally make their life whole, perfect, and complete. People started talking about the book. Discussion groups formed. Blogs popped up all over. The contributing authors, such as Bob Proctor, James Arthur Ray, and a number of others, saw a spike in book and seminar sales as people were willing to pay anything for the "secret" to learning how to master the Law. Unfortunately, most of them went home empty-handed, and found their lives mostly unchanged.

Here's the fascinating part. The book didn't really say anything new. Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich, for example, discussed the exact same principles back in the 1930's, as well as Norman Vincent Peale and a number of other authors. They just learned how to create a new form of the same message, and it sounded (and sold) like something new. It was a breath of fresh air for some people, but the exhilaration was short-lived as they soon discovered that successful application of the Law of Attraction requires consistent, sustained effort over time. As with many other fads, people wanted an instant, effortless payoff and were quickly discouraged when this didn't happen.

But, it's interesting to note that after the fad wore off, their have been several more viral waves. The people who came to the Secret hoping to find prosperity by sitting at home thinking great thoughts soon found out the hard way that this wasn't going to work. However, it was apparent that thoughts do attract things, and that your dominant thought pattern does indeed carry a heavy influence over the external reality that you manifest in life. People began to realize the value of personal development programs, and of community. People started to become aware of old, unconscious thought patterns that kept them carrying emotional baggage year after year, and finally they began to see the damage this was doing. The Law of Attraction fad helped to create a positive context for exploring this. People were no longer afraid to admit that they were having unhealthy thoughts, and could openly discuss them in front of strangers. Numerous other communities have slowly grown into existence to explore this idea in more depth, and the book continues to sell.

Lesson learned: if there's a new grain of truth in your message and it makes people aware of something new, a fad may be a catalyst to spark a self-sustaining viral reaction. But this is easier said than done.