Viral Marketing!/week 7/readings

This week's reading talked about viral marketing. Before the reading I knew very little about viral marketing, but after reading "The New Influencers" I think I know too much. With the new era of technology it is easy to see why viral marketing has become mainstream. Once YouTube became known to the masses companies started learning how to benefit from it. One of the most famous viral marketing campaigns was the coke and mentos campaign. Although coke never endorsed the campaign it sparked a world wide phenomenon, selling a lot of each product. Viral campaigns have become the 21st centuries word-of-mouth. One person puts a video up and then shows a friend and so on. Viral marketing is a genius idea; it appeals to the masses for little or no money. A recent effort was Leonardo Dicaprio's YouTube video that encouraged people to vote. In the video he instructs you to tell five people to vote and then those five people tell another five people and so on. All facets of commerce, as well as the political world, have accepted viral marketing as a viable tool.