SIMPLE VIRAL MARKETING RELATED INFORMATION (WORLDWIDE)

When people are trying to look general information through Internet, search engines maybe the immediate tools they need.

What can we get when we search for viral marketing information through some popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN?

Below are the numbers of results they show when we key in the words ‘Viral Marketing’ in their search bars through service provided by Hong Kong ISP providers:

Yahoo – 54,400,000
Google – 5,770,000
MSN – 4,460,000

Even though there are big different in terms of the number of results, but they have one common area, i.e. they all keep Wikipedia as their 1st result.

WHY VIRAL MARKETING CANNOT WORK BETTER THAN TRADITIONAL WORD OF MOUTH STRATEGY IN HONG KONG?

Base on the definition that viral marketing is a strategy to amplify word of mouth in the digital channels (for example through email or social network), it seems that this strategy may be more useful in cities which fulfil 5 criteria,

1) They are well developed cities,
2) The cities have mature Internet infrastructure,
3) The local telephone charge are costly,
4) The citizens live far away from each other and
5) The citizens are frequent Internet users.

The basic requirement to achieve viral marketing is the existing of mature Internet infrastructure that most likely can be found in all well developed cities like Hong Kong, London, New York, etc. But in order to make viral marketing effective, the rest 4 criteria must also need to meet.

Should the citizens live close to each other, for example in Hong Kong, they may meet frequently easily without the need to communicate through Internet; if the telephone charge were low, for example in Hong Kong again, it would be more convenience for them to communicate through voice than typing; after all, if they are not frequent users of Internet which can be affected by population ageing issue directly, viral marketing will not able to work.

It is easy to understand why viral marketing cannot work better than real life word of mouth in Hong Kong, especially when the population ageing goes serious and major high Internet users are youngsters whose aims to use Internet are mainly playing online games or downloading different programs instead of for real communications or information search.