Viral Marketing is a promotion that, either by design or accident, catches on with Internet users and is passed from one to the other; multiplying the effectiveness of the original distribution.

The classic viral email is the series of Wazzup Super Friends parodies. In case you missed it, clips of animated characters including Superman and Wonderwoman we edited so they appeared to be delivering a Budweiser commercial. The creators of the clips insist that they sent them to only seven friends. Those people liked them and forwarded the clips to their friends. The rest is history. There is no count of how many people finally received them, but they became known worldwide and spawned many imitators.

There are five important necessary elements in developing a viral marketing campaign:

1. You must give away free products or service that appeal to the user. Often the user has to pass the message along in order to claim the free gift

2. Make the transfer effortless by creating compressed messages that can be downloaded and transmitted quickly

3. Make it easy for the program to grow quickly. In most instances it must catch on and spread immediately

4. Use common motivations including the desire to be “in the know” or the desire for free goods

5. Use existing communication networks. The ubiquity of email and the communications networks between friends is what make viral marketing work. Most Internet users have their own distribution list to whom they can quickly circulate items of interest.

Professor Clay Shirky of Hunter College adds that viral marketing “requires two things often in short supply in the marketing world: honesty and execution.”

Permission Marketing author Seth Godin has written a book on viral marketing and in the true viral spirit he makes it available for download free of charge at www.ideavirus.com.