The Art of Viral Marketing…

… doesn’t seem so hard to understand. At least the guys over at Amiando seem to know that your “viral marketing agent (VMA)” will have to either love your application so much that he’d recommend it to his friends or he’d have to profit from sending recommendations. They offer a possibility for Ticket shops to “employ” VMAs by providing them with a promotion code after their ticket purchase. The VMAs can pass on this promotion code to their friends who will get their tickets at a discount rate. At the same time these VMAs will earn some share of the sales money they generate with their recommendations.

However, some more traditional firms still don’t get it. For example Lindt & Sprüngli apparently tried to initiate a competition on Facebook. They created an event to which users may invite their friends. 10 packages of their new chocolate collection will be given out to one lucky Facebook user will chose to “attend” the event before a fixed point of time. My assumption is that they want people to recommend this event to their friends. They want them to talk about Lindt & Sprüngli. Based on this assumption a question suddenly arises: “Why the hell should I recommend this event to my friends and therewith risk they will attend thus decrease my chance of winning the chocolate?”

Dear Lindt & Sprüngli. There are some good examples of incentive-driven viral marketing out there. Please either employ someone who understands modern marketing measures OR try to at least just copy others who understand their business. The positive aspect is that I’m surely not the only youngster who claims to have an idea of what viral marketing could be about and who will therefore discuss with friends how badly this marketing campaign is executed. Bad press is good press aka guerilla marketing – maybe that’s the concept behind 😉