Now you are going to think: What campaign is he talking about ? The famous AI myterious game campaign or one of the other numerous campaigns, that used the desire of the average internet user to send rubbish to all his friends.
What about BMW movies ! Not exactly viral but it was huge success and shaped the image of BMW worldwide ( now copied by dozens of companies ... ). Are we talking about "We love tha moon" ? It's obviously "viral", but not exactly a campaign.
Google gmail.
In one of the most brilliant marketing ploys ever, Google started the ultimate viral campaign.
At the beginning of it Google announced that it would offer a free 1 GB email account.
This was shocking news for the web and everybody immediately wanted one, of course Gmail can in no way provide 100 million email accounts from the beginning, so they started a beta test with a relatively small group, after some time they started to enlarge this group. And here comes the genius ploy: " We have one of the rarest and most valued goods on the internet, free 1 GB email accounts. What is our target group if we want to become the premium email provider ? " The answer is of course simple, we are not talking about the average user, for a succesful campaign you need the Slashdot people. Internet Users who have a lot of online contacts and are engaged in some kind of online community ( blogs, boards ... ) . These users are the target of every viral campaign because they can built free attention, nothing spreads like online memes and these are the people who spread them.
gmail genius:"Ok, we already have a small group testing their accounts, and they all belong to our target group. Let's give everybody 6 invitations so the user can invite 6 other people to join gmail and invite more friends."
That's what I call "viral marketing" !
At the moment you can frequently see offers on community sites, blogs and in your mailbox from friends who invite you to join gmail, the brilliant thing is that already gmail is not the only company offering 1 GB accounts in fact there are several who compete in this area, but the only one getting wide public attention is gmail. At absolutely no cost.
von Florian am 13, 2004 08:31
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