Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals or a business to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message’s exposure and influence. Like viruses, such strategies take advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to thousands, to millions.

The ultimate goal of marketers interested in creating successful viral marketing programs is to create viral messages that appeal to individuals with high social networking potential (SNP) and that have a high probability of being presented and spread by these individuals and their competitors in their communications with others in a short period of time.

Off the Internet, viral marketing has been referred to as “word-of-mouth,” “creating a buzz,” “leveraging the media,” “network marketing.” But on the Internet, for better or worse, it’s called “viral marketing.”

The Kolaver Di Example:

Why This Kolaveri Di (English: Why This Murderous Rage, Girl?) is an Indian song from the soundtrack of the upcoming Tamil film 3, which is due to be released in 2012. The song is fast becoming a case study on how viral marketing can create a cult following for a product.

It’s a classic case of ‘viral marketing’ gone wild, says brand expert Harish Bijoor about the far-reaching impact of the song. Why this Kolaveri Di. This quirky Tanglish (a portmanteau for Tamil and English) number, which became an instant hit as soon as it was digitally released by Sony Music India in the second week of November, has now entered the lexicon of one and all. Three weeks on, the song has received a whopping 19 million hits on YouTube, has been on the playlist of 43 radio stations across India and has been ‘shared’ by over 6.5 million Facebook users.

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