Just a thought that occured me when putting that last post against the link in it: if viral marketing is for niche targeting, how come Gmail, a mainstream web application (everyone uses email), got to make such a good use of it?
Viral marketing
February 17, 2006 — obvio171I had my first experience with Viral Marketing in early April, 2004, when Google came out with its new email solution, Gmail. Lucky me, I was one of the first happy people in the circunference of my social circle to get an invite to try out the service.
I hadn’t done any of the very recent reading I’ve lately been doing on Web 2.0, and had never heard of the term “viral marketing” itself. What I had, though, was a lot of curiosity, a lot of information scavenged around on the new product, and three invitations to share.
The hype at that time was so high, especially among my Computer Engineering colleagues, that I instantly became the blessed holder and provider of this very rare commodity (remember the absurd things people were exchanging it for?).
Having crunched through all the documentation I could find, I became a very well informed and enthusiastic user. I was especially impressed by the explanations on how labels were so much greater than folders (it made so much sense! why hadn’t I thought of that before?) and the keyboard shortcuts. Those were amazing indeed.
So being the user-in-love I was and having those at first few tickets to this widely unknown email paradise, I quickly started telling everyone all about it, advocating that the very cool, unique and innovative features were in fact what made it so awesome, not only the “oh, ok, now I can store more emails” thing I used to hear about the 1Gb.
After a while, and a considerable number of people I brought in, helped around the interface, gave some tips, even translated the help to pt_BR for,I started thinking “damn, this invitation thing really works”. I was the one doing all the advertising for them, user-level, dedicating a whole lot more time to each “customer” than they could ever dream of paying for, and with a granted openness they could never buy.
When I realized that, I started believing that there would be no actual “sign up” way to get your Gmail account after the Beta – like I what I expected -, since this viral method proved a lot more effective. Or at least not until most everyone who had some minimum social contact had gotten their account through this word-of-mouth way. [I wonder, now: did they end up opening Gmail for direct sign-up after all?]
I wanted to make a bigger point out of his, but as a short sum-up (have to leave now), I just wrote this to share that great feeling you get when you learn a formal concept and you realize you had seen it at work, been part of it and made yourself conscious of it. I also saw its value which, nonetheless, is not absolute and does not apply to the advertising strategies of every single product, as this post at HorsePigCow (!!) points out. Worth the read.
