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« Berkman lunch: Aaron Swartz on Open Library || Back to Blog | No static IP for you, you naughty boy! » October 24, 2007
I'm giving a 15 minute dinner-time talk tonight at a marketing company. I think I'm going to begin by saying that whenever a client asks for a "viral marketing campaign," I think: Ah, another acknowledgment that customers are better at marketing than marketers are. Posted
by D. Weinberger at October 24, 2007 03:09 PM
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Comments
You may have a different understanding of viral marketing than I; as far as I know, the original concept for arose from the way hotmail promoted itself in the footer of every email its users sent.
If you asked the users, I'm not sure they'd say they were marketing the service; but that allowing the company to market itself was an acceptable tradeoff for having a free service.
Posted by: dave | October 24, 2007 03:43 PM
You're exactly right about what viral marketing originally meant, Dave. But it quickly moved from meaning marketing unintentionally and inevitably done by customers to campaigns that spread like viruses. So, these days marketers count a YouTube that gets passed around as "viral." And that's the sense in which I'm using it here.
Glad you clarified it. Thanks.
Posted by: David Weinberger | October 24, 2007 03:56 PM
Ah, another acknowledgment that customers are better at marketing than marketers are.
Lovely, short and neat.
Posted by: Jon Husband | October 25, 2007 03:53 AM