Let's face it, nothing will perk up your ears at the water cooler like a nice juicy rumor. This counts double if somebody is on the chopping block, close to being fired. Observe what typically happens in these cases. If somebody just got called into the boss's office and the door slammed shut, everyone will be trying to get an ear up against the wall to find out what's going on. Soon after, if the real truth of the matter isn't ascertained, you can bet that people will begin circulating their theories and speculations as to what happened, and I'll bet you know at least one person who always claims that their theory is solid fact, sometimes even after it's been proven wrong.

Magazines picked up on humankind's perverse, seedy obsession with being the first to whisper a new rumor in someone's ear, and they made a multi-million dollar business out of it. Knowing about something before someone else does means, in our culturally-conditioned mindset, that we're more in the loop than they are. This has led to a mad race to getting to the information first, and being the first to know. The same phenomenon that takes place in cubicle land has been a media sensation. Just go grocery shopping on any day of the week and you'll see a tabloid advertising that someone is pregnant. People love to be voyeurs and they're willing to pay for the privilege.

Notice the simliarity between the launch of a new Godzilla movie and the latest saga with Britney Spears. In both cases, the message has to get out quickly, or it won't hit critical mass soon enough to go viral. Messages of this scale can't rely solely on the rumor mill, or they would quickly become too garbled and confused to be taken seriously. After all, if your sister told you that Jennifer Lopez was being arrested for murder, and you didn't hear about it in the news, you would wonder how she knew about this if it were really true. You'd need some proof. Also, notice how these rumors need a continual supply of novelty in order for the machine to keep making money.

People have short attention spans, and fire burns its fuel quickly in an explosion. That's why they call it a "mill." It has to keep churning and producing in order to be effective. Take the water cooler, for instance. You may overhear the boss muttering under his breath about how so-and-so better clean up his act, or he's out of here. You may relish in tip-toeing over to your co-workers' cubicles and letting them in on the secret, careful to speak quietly enough that those not in your inner circle don't overhear it. But the exclusivity and the sub-rosa nature of rumors is what makes them sexy. As soon as the cat's out of the bag, the rumor becomes yesterday's news. It's either confirmed, disproven, or given "I guess we'll never know" status, and life goes on. After all, it's no fun discovering that you were the last to find out. And news is only news for a short time.

You may think that the tobacco companies did a brilliant job proliferating cigarette smoking with The Marlboro Man, Joe Camel, and numerous other mass-media campaigns that depicted smoking as a coop, hip, and sexy habit that was fun to do. But none of this could possibly have worked without viral marketing. Ironically, the government has tried to thwart the tobacco companies and their efforts by banning them from using some forms of mass media advertising, and severely restricting others. But that's not where they really ever advertised anyway. They advertise virally, and they always have.

Malcolm Gladwell talks about this in his book, The Tipping Point. The tobacco companies, like all other companies, only used mass media advertising to quickly get the word out consistently and plant the message in their loyal customers' minds. In order for the message to spread effectively, they needed to create social utility and a sense of exclusivity. This starts in the dark shadows of the schoolyard, where the cool kids sneak a smoke. This continues into adulthood, where the smoking gazebo outside the building universally becomes perceived as the second water cooler, safe from the prying ears of those uncool non-smokers. If you don't believe me, watch what happens when a non-smoker walks out to the smoking area. Everybody gets suspicious and the conversation quickly shifts to the weather.

The government, and various anti-smoking organizations, have been trying to quelch the allure of smoking by highlighting its unhealthy aspects. They've tried to create emotional disgust by showing pictures of cancer-rotted lungs. But they've missed the point entirely. The people who are affected by that sort of propaganda already don't smoke. For many smokers, the self-destructive aspect of smoking creates an unspoken bond among smokers that adds to its social utility. By creating a negative stigma against smokers and forcing them into the shadows, we've made smoking even more attractive. Smoking will always appeal to teenagers, for example, because it'll always be something they're not allowed to do. Smokers are being bad, and they can wink at each other in the dark about it. In other words, anti-smoking propaganda helps to keep smoking popular.

Finally, the most fun bonus of smoking seems to come when you seduce someone into trying it for the first time. If you're a non-smoker, try asking a smoker to bum you a cigarette, and watch the devilish grin spread across their face. This certainly explains the well-documented proliferation of videos on YouTube, showing young girls smoking. It's natural that enthusiastic smokers enjoy the idea of mass-seducing new people to the Dark Side through sex appeal. The beauty of this, from the tobacco industry's standpoint, is that their customer evangelists have created a whole new profitable industry around selling messages that promote cigarette smoking. It's been speculated that the tobacco companies have a hand in this phenomenon. Maybe they do and maybe they don't. Either way, it doesn't matter.

The tobacco companies have, indeed, done a masterful job. Notice how they haven't really changed anything about the intrinsic nature of smoking, but how avid smokers have managed to create new novelties from it all on their own. Ironically, this is one of the first examples of how viral marketing will soon become the gold standard.

To the irritation of the Postal Service, people with too much time on their hands took to creating letters that they'd send to their friends. This was back in the days when people were really gullible. Imagine opening a letter from your cousin that says you're going to lose your job and suffer from bad luck if you don't send ten copies of this letter to ten more friends of yours. Add to this the fact that most people didn't have computers or word processors, so complying with the terms of a chain letter meant hand-copying the letter with pen and paper, or typing it up on one of those old mechanical typewriters where you had to be careful not to strike two keys at the same time, lest the hammers smack into each other and get stuck.

I never did understand why the Postal Service condemned this, and as a matter of fact, I've often speculated that they were behind it all along. After all, they were the ones making all the money on it. But that's an aside. The point is that people found the allure of sending a letter to their friends to play a game alluring enough to dredge through the mundane tedium of hand-copying the same letter over and over again. This is one virus that, for a time, had a strong host. Maybe it was the superstitious gullibility, maybe it was the anticipation of having the chain letter come back to them, or maybe it was the thrill of being connected to the world at large. It's hard to say, personally, because I just threw them in the trash can.

But, years later, the same phenomenon popped back up when e-mail hit critical mass and everyone had it. Sooner or later, it was inevitable that people would get the bright idea to start forwarding everything to everybody. Long lists of jokes, poems, political rants, and just about anything you can think of started to flood people's inboxes. For a time, everyone seemed to enjoy it. But then, a second critical mass happened. People started to receive the same old stale jokes again and again, and their inboxes filled up with more and more clutter. Instead of being grateful, they started to get annoyed and send reply e-mails stating something to the effect of, "Stop sending me this garbage." Now, forwarding e-mails has taken on a negative stigma.

Both of these examples show how viral marketing has limits. Somewhat like a collapsing star, sooner or later the fuel of mass appeal starts to run out, and at its peak, the contagion starts to die off. Lesson learned: novelty has a shelf life. If you don't add new value to your viral campaign, it will suffer the inevitable fate of being quickly forgotten. Even the most initially-successful viral campaigns can become a flash in the pan this way, and end up as a Trivial Pursuit question that only nerds know the answer to.

Word of mouth advertising is not the same as viral marketing, but it's the oldest form of viral marketing. You hear about an idea from somebody, they heard it from somebody else, and so on. It's a well-documented fact that this remains the number one most effective form of advertising to this day. The reason is simple. Most people are more likely to believe things that they hear from their friends than they are to believe the same things from someone they don't know.

There's also a second key to word of mouth advertising: it works because there is no finanical incentive tied to it. In other words, when you hear about something via word of mouth, the person telling you about it isn't being paid to tell you about it. That raises their credibility as well, even if you don't know them personally.

The credibility of word-of-mouth advertising has been slightly diminished over the past several decades due to the second reason. Companies have found sneaky ways to bribe people to tell their friends about products and services. One example of this is network marketing. Ann Sieg points this out in her report, The Seven Great Lies of Network Marketing. She notes how MLM companies typically tell their distributors that doing the business is just about sharing products, and that the business model works because of word of mouth advertisting. However, she asserts, it's no longer "word-of-mouth" when there is direct financial compensation tied to it. And she's right. Some people will sell out their friends for a quick buck.

Another phenomenon that has damaged word-of-mouth advertising is affiliate marketing. Take, for example, the fact that I included my affiliate link to Ann Sieg's report in the preceding paragraph. I'll also include here a seemingly-innocuous link to her e-book, The Renegade Network Marketer. It would appear, on the surface, that I'm just sharing some information about somebody else's web site that you might want to know about. But I'm being paid a commisson on each sale of her book, so rest assured that I really would love for you to click on these links and bust out your credit card. Thanks to GoDaddy.com, I can hide this fact by slapping a new domain on it that masks my affiliate information. Don't think for a second that I'm the only one doing this. You'll also notice some other affiliate links of mine at the bottom of this page. Feel free to click these links and buy many copies of these books as well.

Despite these attempts to cheapen and thwart word of mouth advertising, though, this mode of advertising in its genuine form still seems to work well. People can usually smell a rat. If someone is just trying to make a quick snatch and grab at your money, that fact usually becomes obvious before too long. For example, when someone is just telling you about a cool new product or service, they're not usually too persistent about it unless they have a direct incentive for you to use it. If that incentive is the fun they'll have using it with you, they'll be open and honest about it. If they're just trying to make money off of you, you'll see what's going on before too long.

You may think that the motion picture industry relies on press releases, TV ads, and theater previews to get the word out about new films. And to an extent, they do. But nowhere near as much as they rely on viral marketing.

Let's start with the obvious. You know by now that no matter how good the preview is for a movie, you won't bother to go see it if three of your friends saw it and all told you that it stinks. You probably have several friends who all make it out to the movies before you do, and you probably wait for them to go see any movie that you're sitting on the fence about. That way, you'll get their take on it before you drop $12 on a ticket. I can remember seeing the preview for the Hulk movie in 2003 and really looking forward to going to see it. But soon after the movie came out, my friends all started to shake their heads in sympathetic embarrassment. I never found one person who had anything good to say about that movie, and so consequently, I still haven't seen it. You probably have a movie like this on your list as well.

Now, the new platforms of social media have made this happen even faster. Within days of the release of a new film, reviews are all over the Internet about it. By the time a movie hits the theaters, you can go to your local college campus and find someone who's already downloaded a pirated copy of the movie and has it on their iPod. I remember seeing a bootleg DVD of the third Terminator movie before the movie was in the theaters. Add to that the user reviews on countless movie sites, as well as the ability to communicate about this via Facebook and other social networking sites, and you can tell whether a film will be a blockbuster sensation or a flop within 24 hours of its release.

The mass marketing of a movie does matter, just because they want a lot of people to find out about a movie fast. One critical aspect of viral marketing is critical mass. Until a viral campaign reaches a certain number of people, it doesn't offer a significant amount of social utility. The motion picture industry realizes this, and to spread buzz about a movie through low-budget, strictly-viral means simply isn't practical for their economic model. They need to release the movie and open big. But to stay big and grow bigger, the movie has to be viral. This is what makes the difference between a blockbuster and a flop.

If people talk smack about a movie, it doesn't matter if its producer spent a billion dollars launching the flashiest campaign of the century.

I remember hearing about MySpace from several friends back in 2004. I didn't pay any attention at the time. It sounded to me like a passing fad, which is how a lot of virally marketed products and services start out. Amazon.com was a fad, the light bulb was a crackpot idea, and the list goes on. I started to hear about it from a few other people here and there, and pretty soon, I had people offering to make a MySpace page for me. Several of my female friends urged me to get started on MySpace, assuring me that I'd have an easy time finding a girlfriend on MySpace.

MySpace popularized the idea of online social networking, and the idea was a huge hit. They attained their status by taking advantage of several key aspects of viral marketing. The main benefit that caused MySpace to explode was interactive utility. In other words, MySpace became a lot more fun to use when all of your friends were using it. It created a mainstream platform for computer and internet addiction, and the world hasn't been the same since. Creating opportunities to meet new people online wasn't enough. There were already countless websites doing that, such as personals and dating web sites. Instead, they created opportunities to interact with your existing friends in new ways. For example, MySpace popularized the concept of the "comment wall," where users can communicate to each other publicly by posting messages on each other's profiles, which can be viewed by anyone. This has now become a standard feature of social networking sites.

A key thing to note is that MySpace isn't particularly good. As usual, it's better to be first than best. Screen clutter, cheap advertising, low-quality MIDI music, and other annoyances characterize a typical user's MySpace page. But that didn't matter. When your friends are all using something, other, better sites will still lose the battle. For example, In 2007, a business colleague of mine told me that he had set up a MySpace account simply because he had several friends who wouldn't communicate with him any other way than on MySpace.

I have to admit it; to this day, I don't have a MySpace page. I don't plan on getting one anytime soon, simply because my to-do list is too long and my friends are all on Facebook. But I have to admit, they did a heck of a job getting to where they are.

Honda's famous ad for the Accord (see the embedded video in this hub) was a great example of viral marketing. They realized that mass-marketing and traditional television ads were diminishing in effectiveness, because the chess game was nearing checkmate. Television ads used to hold the power to keep their audience hostage by monopolizing the channels of information. In the days of thirteen channels on TV, this was simple to do if you had the money to do it, and the investment was reasonably certain to pay off quickly enough.

Times have changed, however, now that people can fast-forward commercials or even cut them out entirely by using their TiVo's. Or, there's the crowd who just waits until the end of the season and watches a marathon of TV shows on DVD that have no commercials on them at all. In other words, the people are in control now, and they don't have to pay attention to anything they don't want to listen to. Honda understood this when they made their famous Accord ad that remains posted on YouTube to this day.

Instead of buying the rights to a large channel of information that allowed them to broadcast a typical, boring, non-memorable car advertisement to as many people as possible in the hopes that many of them would be too lazy to get up off the couch while it ran (like most companies still do), Honda decided to invest in making a really great ad that was fun to watch, and that people would want to tell their friends about. They shot thousands of takes and spent millions of dollars paying a team of engineers to disassemble a Honda piece by piece and create a "domino" display. The brilliant part was that it demonstrated the reliability of Honda products without saying a word. Even someone who knows nothing about cars can clearly see that creating a commercial like this requires building a quality product.

The result: the ad got millions of views, and they didn't have to pay a dime for any of them. People saw the ad on the internet and e-mailed their friends about it. Simple as that. You can still see the ad on YouTube today, and people are still talking about it. Not just this hub, either. Read any one of Seth Godin's books and you're likely to run across a segment praising the marketing genius of Honda corporation. Lesson learned: instead of paying for flashy advertising, invest in creating a great product worth talking about, and then put together a message about that product that's worth spreading. When this becomes the norm, we won't even know the difference between the ads and the TV shows. This may or may not be a good thing in every way, but at least it will make life more entertaining.

This was brilliant. OfficeMax and Burger King, respectively, created a way to market themselves by stepping completely outside of their core product line by giving customers a new experience with their brand. As for how much money they actually made on these ventures, that's questionable, but they did make these tools go viral very quickly.

OfficeMax created a software platform called "Elf Yourself," where you can superimpose your own face onto a dancing elf, and e-mail your friends and family a video of this elf doing a dance to Christmas music. It's not really good for much more than a cheap laugh, but these days, that's all we really need. They did another intriguing thing; they only offer it during the holidays; the "elfing" service ends right after New Years. So, now they've made it an annual tradition that people have come to slowly associate with their brand name. The appeal to this, from a viral marketing standpoint, is the social utility. It creates a new context to interact with your friends and family in a fun way. Simple, but effective. We're easily amused, and we spread the message happily.

You can still Simpsonize yourself at the web site created by Burger King. This created a whole new type of social utility. For years, people have reported watching sitcoms and starting to feel as if they were part of the show. The Simpsonizer has taken this to a new level. It started to catch on in our Raleigh-based sushi Meetup Group, where several members (including yours truly) now use Simpsonized avatars. If you've watched the Simpsons, you know they take pride in creating an alternate universe where every man, woman, and child has a yellow, four-fingered double. The Simpsonizer has brought this reality one step closer to its final manifestation, and we're all happy to be part of it. Of course, the more of our friends do it, the more fun it is. We love the idea of building the new Simpsonized world, and we love getting to be part of it. It's almost like getting to be a guest on a Simpsons episode. Imagine what fun that would be if your friends were on the show, too.

These sites are examples of how social utility doesn't have to have any practical use. It just has to give people a cheap laugh, and this can make a message spread like wildfire. But more importantly, it created the opportunity for fans to interact with each other in a new way, and in the process, it created a new experience with the brand. The branding element is a side note; the important lesson to take away from this is that imagination is a powerful thing, and sometimes it can be enough to tip the scales and create a sensation. Lesson learned: nothing is too useless to go viral.