Viral Marketing: Trickle In Approach

The Viral Brand is created mainly through the reach and ability of the influentials to communicate about the same to the Mass. So for effective Viral Marketing, it is important to target the right influentials.

Even if influentials are several times as influential as a normal person, they have little impact beyond their own immediate neighborhood.
Hence brand idea or a trend ends up getting diluted as it travels farther out of the influentials’ control. So, while the idea might gather more of a reach, it diminishes in traction and is eventually outlived by fresher, newer ideas that demand consumers’ attention.


So, instead of “trickling down,” can we “trickle in” and keep the influentials feeding off each other’s discoveries, which will in turn affect the mass?

One clear example of a brand that seems to be playing in this territory is Firefox. Targeting these very influentials helped (Mozilla) Firefox to “trickle in” its efforts to preserve meaningful choice and promote innovation on the internet. By targeting the tech-savvy mavens, Firefox soon started gaining in popularity.

Today, viral marketing is based completely on a scatter gun approach, and maybe that’s why we cannot predict what is going to happen. We need strategies that depend on being able to measure things very well.

This gives credence to the Peter Drucker quote, “You cannot manage what you cannot control, and you cannot control what you cannot measure.”