viral marketing

noun

1. a method of marketing whereby consumers are encouraged to share information about a company’s goods or services via the Internet.

Viral marketing (or viral advertising) is a marketing technique that uses pre-existing social networking services and other technologies to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives (such as product sales or marketing buzz) through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of viruses or computer viruses. It can be delivered by word of mouth or enhanced by the network effects of the Internet and mobile networks.

The concept is often misused or misunderstood, as people apply it to any successful enough story without taking into account the word “viral”.

Methods
Viral marketing often involves and utilizes:

Customer participation and polling services
Industry-specific organization contributions
Web search engines and blogs
Mobile smartphone integration
Multiple forms of print and direct marketing
Target marketing web services
Search engine optimization (SEO)
Social media optimization (SMO)
Television and radio
Influencer marketing

Viral target marketing is based on three important principles:

Social profile gathering
Proximity market analysis
Real-time key word density analysis