A Good Kind of Viral

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In chapter 6 of Antony Young's book, Brand Media Strategy: Integrated Communications Planning in the Digital Era, he discusses what he calls "The power of free". This chapter touches on how powerful social media and digital messaging can be for a company. Viral marketing, or word of mouth marketing, is an important part of marketing which if used right, can be a big part of spreading a message. With the digital outlets and advanced technology available today, it is so easy to spread messages through the Internet and social media. It does not matter the size of your company, anyone can send and promote their company or message via social media. The Internet gives an instantaneous access and ability to send your message which ever form it may be in. Viral messages can even be in the form of a video, which is shared usually through Youtube. Young touches on "the Youtube effect" in chapter 6 of his book. 

Ice Bucket Challenge

A really great example of a viral message, which happens to include video is of the Ice Bucket Challenge which really took off this past summer. As you may know, this is where all sorts of people from all over the country would take videos of themselves dumping ice water over their heads. They also gave donations for ALS (what the video was spreading awareness for) and call out their friends to take the challenge. People may say this does nothing but really it must have had some sort of impact seeing how viral it actually went. People all over knew about this challenge and it actually got people to become more aware of ALS. 

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Who Trusts Word of Mouth?

Consumers trust other consumers. A similar aspect of word of mouth outside of sharing videos or promoted messages deals with the positive impact of recommendations. People are more likely to believe what a friend shares with them over what a company may say about itself. I know that I tend to take and trust recommendations from friends or family more. How about you? I think the best way for any company to promote word of mouth marketing among their customers is to simply allow feedback. It is best to allow reviews on pages such as Facebook, this way you can maintain the comments but also allow everyone to see the positive reviews. Overall, using the media to your advantage, especially when including customers, is a great step to success.