“If the Internet can be described as a giant human consciousness, then viral marketing is the illusion of free will.” – George Pendle

Viral marketing is everything that is wrong and everything that is right about the internet. Aimed at those of us who have been beat down, worn out, and fed up with traditional advertising, viral marketing is designed to entice us into participation.

Whether it is the result of a few hours in mom’s basement or a targeted campaign by Mega Company, viral marketing is cheap and it works. It has the ability to explode in just a few short generations with exponentially increasing reach. Done right, you don’t have to spend money on advertising or time begging the media to cover you. If you make something people want, they will find you.

So you didn’t ask, “What is viral marketing?” You were looking for some tips and tricks to do it well. You wanted to promote your brand to fame and fortune. You wanted other people to tell your story. So here it is:

Make your message memorable. Whatever you’re pushing should be able to be summed up in 7 words or less. Write down your message then remove all unnecessary words – now cut it in half.

Evoke emotion. Have an opinion and express it. Make people love or hate you. Make them laugh out loud or cringe in fear. Make them feel like an idiot or a genius. Whatever you do, just make them feel something.

Never restrict access. If you want your campaign to succeed, it needs to get a life of its own. Registrations, downloads, unlock codes, are all huge “no no’s”. Viral marketing is a tightrope walk of exclusionary cool without actually being exclusive.

Keep it short. Videos should be somewhere between 20 seconds and 3 minutes. With millions of choices, users are here then gone. Don’t bore them.

Don’t beat people over the head with promotional content. Remember, this is the anti-commercial. Save your selling for your website. Viral marketing is to drive people not to sell them.

Have various content. And have it all available at once. You don’t know what will succeed, and if something does hit, a user is going to want to see more. That’s a good thing.

Nobody can – with certainty – tell you if something is going to succeed. In the purity of viral marketing, it’s really just a numbers game. Put a lot of content out there, and hope that something will hit. On the other hand, there is also the more nefarious side of viral marketing. Part II ‚”The Dark Side”