Viral marketing
The project we are working on right now is focusing on viral marketing. Viral marketing means we are not talking about a normal “campaign” that is advertised to the target group by the company that started the campaign (via radion, newspapers, tv, banners, etc), but it is mainly spread by the target group itself (like a virus). Where it used to be word-of-mouth, nowadays of course it’s going much faster on the internet. For more info, check wikipedia on viral marketing.
Social networks
There are a lot of online social networks, both business (LinkedIn, Xing, etc) as private (Facebook, Hyves, Twitter, etc). The power of these social networks is that they enable the user to show themselves and contact friends, relations. And all that in a user friendly way, no copy-pasting e-mail address, but button-click functionality to expand your network and show who you are.
Contribute and win
My current project combines the viral marketing and the social networks into one. A marketing message that is spread to the user group via the social networks, by the target group itself. A powerfull combination, and the concept leads to a lot of positive response. People are invited to enroll in a competition (motive: you can win something nice). Of course we ask the information that is the main goal for the marketing campaign (a content submit and/or personal details). So there is a win-win-win situation. The marketing goal is reached, the target group is happy to join a competition and win awesome prices, overall costs drop because of the use of available networks.
Of course a new blog post will follow after we have the first release live 
Interesting use of this approach: Use a viral to see if a community has added value for your business/product.
Filed under: Componence | Tagged: Facebook, Hyves, LinkedIn, social networks, Twitter, viral marketing, Xing
a nice start. i would say, social media is really dominating the search industry. so every blog should focus no social networks if not already focusing. i just started with twitter. lets see how it goes .
[...] of this various scripts and programs have been created to perform viral marketing, but only Twitter – tomvanlamoen.wordpress.com 04/17/2009 Viral marketing The project we are working on right now is [...]
Social media is Social media when you combaine it with viral marketing it becomes a very powerfull tool together and it can bring very good results.