I'm not a marketing guy. I'm a "technologist" (at least, this is how Hillel Cooperman kindly referred to me), but, I was just reading a blog post on Read/WriteWeb from Emre Sokullu "teaching" entrepreneurs on how to market their product and saw this:
"...You want to reach thousands of users as quickly as possible. Aha, you think, the cheapest and shortest path is viral marketing - via blogs and social news sites. ..."
And just to be clear -- again -- I'm not a marketing expert, but I had to learn a lot (I mean, *a lot*) about marketng to make sure I didn't ruin Sampa. And from the phrase above I can guarantee you that Emre Sokullu is not a marketing guy either. Heck, he knows even less than I know.
What he describe as "viral marketing" is not viral at all. That is PR -- good and old traditional press release work. This is also not new. Decades ago, having a big hit on a mainstream publication would be the equivalent of TechCrunch for a Web 2.0 company today. If you've got mentioned on Newsweek, NYT or CNN you could see your product fly out of the shelves, or your phones non-stop ringing. And that still happens today, independent of the Internet.
That begs the question: What is viral marketing?
Maybe I don't have the best definition, and I'm sure if I go to Wikipedia I'll find a great explanation (or a bad one, it depends on who edited it), but my definition goes like this:
Viral Marketing is when the customer is doing the marketing for a company.
What do you prefer to have, one excellent VP of Marketing, or 10,000 extremely satisfied customers that can't stop talking about your product and referring new customers?
Now, every company will have a viral multiplier. That multiplier is a rate of the existing user base. Some companies will have a very low multiplier. Maybe each 50 existing customers will bring 1 new customer. Some companies will have a very high multipler, as in each customer will bring 6 new customers.
Since we did a lot of work on the last 3 months at measuring, understanding and tweaking our viral rate, I could go on and on of how you do those things, but that is a very long blog post for now.
My recommendation is to not trust a technical guy with tips on how to do marketing. Get a marketing guy (or gal).
I'm the Co-founder & CTO of 
