Marketing phenomenon that facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message.
Information
Viral marketing depends on a high pass-along rate from person to person.
If a large percentage of recipients forward something to a large number
of friends, the overall growth snowballs very quickly. If the pass-along
numbers get too low, the overall growth quickly fizzles.
At the height of B2C it seemed as if every startup had a viral component
to its strategy, or at least claimed to have one. However, relatively
few marketing viruses achieve success on a scale similar to Hotmail,
widely cited as the first example of viral marketing.
