Blue Knowledge

BlueKnowledge and Viral Marketing

Viral marketing refer to social networking technologies and marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks (your customer base) to produce increases in brand awareness, increase in "buzz", more sales, more customers, less cost for your marketing budget and better customer satisfaction. It can be word-of-mouth delivered (people talking to friends about your business) or enabled by our Social Networking Technology (SNT). Our SNT provides you with newsletters, forums (bulletin boards), email blasts, blogs and RSS that empowers your customers to spread the word about your business.

Viral marketing is a marketing phenomenon that facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message voluntarily.

It it is fairly well known that a satisfied customer tells an average of three to five people about a product or service he/she likes, and ten people about a product or service which he/she did not like. Viral marketing is based on this natural human behavior.

This is a pretty simple concept we all know -- your business "buzz" just replicates, again and again with geometrically increasing power, doubling with each iteration:

This is the most powerful and cost effective means of marketing.

The goal for BlueKnowledge is to create a successful viral marketing programs for your business. We'll help you to identify customers with high Social Networking Potential (SNP) and then create messaging campaigns that appeal to a broad segment of your customers and have a high probability of being passed along.

The most famous case illustrating the power of viral marketing is free email provider Hotmail. In its first 18 months of operation, Hotmail signed up over 12 million users, every one of whom filled out a detailed demographic and psychographic profile in exchange for a free email account. Hotmail's total marketing budget was only $500,000. If this seems like a lot, compare it to Juno's $20 million that was spent to garner only one-third of the users Hotmail signed up.

How did Hotmail do it? The strategy was simple. On the bottom of each and every Hotmail email was the phrase, "Get your free private email at www.hotmail.com." Interesting fact: today Hotmail is the largest email provider in India despite never having spent a dime in that market.

The instant messaging service, ICQ, is another viral marketing success story, though they were never even intending to market themselves. When ICQ was created in 1996, it was unlike anything else like it. People would tell other people about ICQ and would share their ICQ ID #s. Unlike HotMail, ICQ spent ZERO marketing dollars and was eventually acquired by AOL for over $287 million. At the time of its acquisition, ICQ had about 30 million users.

Free email fax service, EFax.com, used a strategy similar to Hotmail's with similar success. In only 8 weeks, they signed up more than 300,000 subscribers - all through viral email marketing.

These are all very real opportunities for your business using the Social Site Works product. read more >>