What do you think about viral advertising

Agree about getting bombarded with emails.

I know our newsletter for MLS gets pretty good results, but must admit not knowing much about viral marketing. I know Steve's been looking into it but i don't really understand how you would start it off, and what benefit a business gets out of it, if say you send a joke or game to lots of people.

I would love to be responsible for a well known viral campaign! I like the idea of sending web games, whether thats enough to get the end user to visit the site, I'm not so sure.

Suppose it's easier for different websites. If we were a joke shop, or maybe fancy dress, then sending out daft mails may work, but not sure how you would do this with a business directory like MLS.

Jury's out, definately one I need to learn more about, so be good to see if anybody else has any success.

I suppose twitter could be classed as viral, so in that case, I'm not doing to bad!!

viral works. Anyone who thinks different is a fool.

Be creative, something interesting, humour, game, freeware app, freebie, and then blast it out. Use email, twitter, facebook.

Keep experimenting, most of your ideas will suck, but you get one good one, then wham, your site goes down due to much traffic

Viral works again and again, my new video tutorials are driving insane traffic to my site from the blog now, and my Twitter Backgrounds are going down a storm, just had an SEO expert buy her 2nd one, just to advertise bonfire night (UK)

Obviously viral is huge to me being a graphic designer, if it looks good people will sit up and take notice, huge fan!

The word "viral" itself has bad connotations.............
Unwanted and hard to get rid of springs to mind.
Not knowing what it meant until I googled it just now still leads me to believe it isn't a desireable thing.
Bear in mind I have only a very limited opinion, and absolutely NO experience or understanding of the concept.

Viral marketing is effective because just like a virus, it spreads from person to person, one individual transmitting it to maybe one, maybe twenty others, with studies indicating that on average a satisfied consumer tells three people about something they like.

With viral marketing, there is a huge probability that the message will reach people that are interested in it. Since the concept of viral marketing is essentially passing on a message from a user to another person, most likely, the user will pass it to a person whom he knows will be interested in it. Thus, the percentage of wasted advertising, which is sending the message to the wrong market, will be reduced.
Since viral marketing reaches a good number of the business' target market, there is also a big possibility to have a high turnover ratio. Even if the responses will not immediately convert into profits, there will still be huge traffic that the business will receive which is what most web owners want.

I love viral marketing as an end-user, because often it's funny and a lot of time and effort and energy has been put into it.

My favourite at the moment has to be the Old Spice campaign. The original ad really appealed to my sense of humour. Then I found out it was done all in one continuous uncut shot (admittedly with dozens and dozens of takes) and in 'real life' rather than green screen* - and so I was engaged by it again from a technical interest viewpoint.

However it hasn't made me go out and buy any Old Spice.


*Apart from the animation of the bottle of Old Spice rising from the diamonds (obvious), and an airbrushing in the final 1.5 seconds where a bit of a boom was in shot (forgiveable).

Phew, was worried for a minute

here's one that seemed to work ok

YouTube - IKEA - Facebook showroom

regards

Tom