The computer industry is often very cruel to the English language. There are a lot of ugly phrases we use regularly. Killer app. User interface. Monetize. Steve Ballmer. But at the top of my list of least favorite phrases stands viral marketing.
If you read the book "The Hot Zone" or know anything about Ebola, you can see the obvious appeal of comparing a marketing strategy to a biological virus. Despite its ill-chosen name, viral marketing actually might help you move some product. It is the idea that once people begin to consume a product, they effectively start playing the part of the product's marketer. Like a virus, it spreads through the population, rendering the masses unable to resist the product's message.
The skeptical and sharp-eyed among you might ask, "Is this really anything new?" After all, when you buy Nikes, don't you become a walking commercial? Isn't your car a shiny advertisement? Where would Donna Karan be if DKNY wasn't plastered like a billboard across so many of her products?
In fact, marketing usually has a viruslike quality--and I'm not referring to how it makes you want to wretch. But the Internet has made the contagion very, very easy to spread. Consider the Internet your opportunity to have a coworker sneeze into your e-mail box. The speed with which a compelling idea can spread is astonishing.
Consider the success of certain cult favorites of the Net. Who has not whiled away a few minutes watching the dancing hamsters of nuttysites.com? For a while there, millions of people knew that a Turkish man named Mahir hoped to "kiss you!" The Net is the perfect vehicle for spreading obscure and strange ideas--you know, the ones that really grab people.
If you doubt the business implications, consider Hotmail. Hotmail was a simple idea--Web based e-mail. It was so simple, in fact, that its founder, Sabeer Bhatia, went to great pains to keep it a secret until he was assured of an unstoppable lead, should anybody copy the idea. The firm root of Hotmail's phenomenal growth was a little advertisement at the bottom of every message. Embedded in each Hotmail message was a solicitation to try the service. Now, the idea has been copied ad infinitum by Yahoo!, Excite, and many others. Oh, and Bhatia sold the service to Microsoft for $450 million.
But that's the past, right? As we all know, the dot-coms crashed from their lofty heights last spring. Internet businesses are dropping like tipsy Shriners at a weekend convention in Vegas. The bloom is off the rose. B-to-C is dead and B-to-B is in the ICU with tubes up her nose.
Or, what about Amihotornot.com? "Am I hot or not?" is a question to which you can finally get the answer. If you haven't visited the site, be assured you'll eventually get there. On Amihotornot.com, you can find posted pictures of average (and not so average) folks. Then--here's the kicker--you rate them on a scale of one to 10, judging them by your own standard of what's hot. Your rating gets aggregated with that of everyone else who's voted, and soon enough there's a tally of your "hotness" quotient. This is not a site for that picture of yourself with the Flock of Seagulls haircut and parachute pants, nor is it a service that's particularly kind to people's egos.
But it's spread like the flu in a daycare center. Two guys, armed only with a compelling idea and a little Web savvy, are generating millions of page views. That kind of traffic can mean real money from Internet advertising. The big portals pay millions in the hopes of attracting that kind of traffic.
Sure, the expiration date is already stamped on this idea. I'm taking a risk just writing about it, given the lead time for ComputerUser. For the digerati, it is already old hat. But Amihotornot.com shows the power of an infectious idea, one that no antivirus utility can stop.
And it's an idea that occurred after the Internet-business meltdown.
The Internet is still here. There are millions of people on the Internet, with millions of dollars in their pockets, available for spending. They're just waiting for the next great idea to infect their collective consciousness.
The demise of so many companies doesn't signal the end of Internet commerce as much as it indicates the need for compelling ideas. And viral marketing is an idea worth incubating.
Sean M. Dugan is a contributing editor for ComputerUser and InfoWorld magazines.
