Warnings of the Melissa virus circled the globe in a matter of days. Hotmail, a free email service, spread onto every continent soon after launching. Animated emails, depicting a randy president, hit desktop PCs around the U.S. within hours of major news announcements.
What do all those events have in common besides the Internet? They're all examples of memes (rhymes with "teams") in action.
Who cares? Well, companies like sixdegrees.com, zapa.com, PleaseRSVP.com and many others. They've all turned a theory into the base for a successful business. And many other innovative, as well as more traditional companies, are learning how to translate memes into new customers, leads and brand builders. So what are memes? They are simply "packets" of self-replicating information passed between human "hosts" through text, voice, image or sound. The theory of memes was developed to help understand the evolution of ideas and concepts. Some ideas have characteristics similar to DNA passed down through generations, such as religious memes designed to spread the "word" and pop culture memes that spread rapidly like an epidemic-PokŽmon's "Gotta catch 'em all!" Cultural contagion. Memes, some call them mind viruses, display certain inherent characteristics that enable them to reproduce, just as a cell can divide and replicate. First, they are compelling to the host, inducing him or her to assimilate the meme and actively promulgate it.
Secondly, memes can be replicated easily, so that they can be transmitted easily via voice, text and/or image. Thus, they can reach the greatest number of people. Finally, successful memes generally do not contradict the beliefs of the people they reach.
The practice is not new. Word-of-mouth, gossip, folk tales and myths have been around as long as speech itself. What is new is the speed and breadth at which memes can spread, thanks to technology. Memes are also now used forward business objectives. "A primary purpose of a network, such as the Internet, is to support communication. In this role, and especially as a carrier of email messages, it serves to disperse memes, spreading them across the network rapidly and accurately," said Garry Marshall in his work titled The Internet and Memetics. "Recently, the principal use of the Internet has moved from e-mail to the World Wide Web. While e-mail is still widely used, the move to the World Wide Web has caused a shift in emphasis from carrying messages to the storage of interconnected documents. The results of this change are, among others, to ensure the longevity of memes and to link together related memes. The consequence of the availability of both e-mail and the World Wide Web is that the Internet is, for its users, an ideal medium for the spread, replication and storage of memes."1 She told two friends, and they told two friends and so on, and so on... Hotmail, acquired by Microsoft, is an early viral marketing success story. When users of its free Internet service send email, they "infect" their recipients with the Hotmail brand and service via a tagline affixed to the bottom of each message.
The host then becomes an "evangelist" for the product. Each time the host sends an email, he or she transmits not only an "ad," but effectively, an endorsement to potential hosts. In little more than a year, Hotmail signed up more than 12 million subscribers and spent less than $500,000 on marketing.
"Viral marketing can be defined as when the product (or users using the product) sells itself," said Sharad Daswani, CEO and founder of PleaseRSVP.com. "Our online invitation and RSVP system does just that. When a host or event planner invites, say 50, guests, those guests learn about PleaseRSVP.com by using the service to view their invitation and RSVPing to the event.
The guest then receives a confirmation email from PleaseRSVP.com and the event planner gets periodic updates via email on the RSVP count. Inevitably, several of those 50 guests return to host an event of their own, usually within days or weeks."
The use of viral marketing continues to increase, due primarily to the ease of distribution over the Internet. A growing number of companies specialize in the use of memes or viral marketing campaigns to sell products, create a buzz among target audiences, build databases and increase brand recognition.
Companies using viral techniques to raise brand awareness of their product or service increasingly turn to Internet shops like Adtools, based outside of Boston. The company developed a product called Message Mates, a series of animated or "rich-media" emails. Adtools claims its online corporate marketing and branding tools can achieve pass-along ratios in excess of 100-to-1. Adtools attributes much of its success to the ease of use of its animated emails, which don't require plug-ins or assistant applications.
"Viral marketing is becoming more a core strategy than a trend," said Adtools' Chris Heitman. "The technology is moving towards the ability to lower the resistance to pass-along in order to support this. That means smaller file sizes, with no dependency on helper apps. We've also seen built-in functionality to help in the pass-along." Online communications tools are becoming increasingly sophisticated. ActiveTrack, by Thinking Media allows you to not only develop rich-media emails, but also track their use.
A tiny Java applet in the attachment acts as a radio transmitter. Once the attachment is opened, the transmitter sends real-time data detailing where the ad ran and how the surfers are interacting with it.
The use of such tools, while increasingly popular, can carry some risk. Nearly every corporate IT department has concerns about viruses being transmitted via attachments.
Recently, as a hoax, someone sent an email message indicating that a virus was attached to Nvision Design's pass-a-long email game, Elf Bowling. Apparently the game contained no virus, according to Symantec's anti-virus research center. The incident raises security concerns that need to be considered before sending an attachment like the Nvision's game or even a multimedia email.
Still, even factoring in such concerns, we may soon find , "What's your replication strategy?" has entered (infected?) the lexicon of marketing professionals-pass it on.
Posted by Reid at April 2, 2000 10:54 PM