Have You Been Tricked by Viral Marketing? Join the Crowd

Imagine you're sitting in a bar having a drink with a few friends when one of them chimes in about a new gadget they just got -- some kind of electronic daytimer, let's say, with all the new bells and whistles. Your friend takes the gizmo out, gushes about how great it is, shows off a few features, and then sticks it back in his or her bag before you order another round.

Chances are you've been in this kind of situation before: whether it's a new cell phone, MP3 player or album, we all like to tell our friends how much we like or don't like the things we buy.

But what if you found out your friend hadn't actually purchased the daytimer? What if, in fact, it was given to him or her for the explicit purpose of flashing it around and generating hype around it? What if you found out they were reporting back to a marketing firm to let them know how you reacted?

Welcome to the weird world of viral marketing, where word-of-mouth rules, and anyone can be an insider. It may sound scary at first, but it's pointless to panic.

The truth is, you were probably infected long ago, whether you knew it or not.

Catching the bug

Viral marketing certainly comes with all sorts of malevolent connotations attached. Just the term "viral" in and of itself often conjures up images of catastrophe: crashing computers, avian flu epidemics, or maybe that disease-ridden monkey from Outbreak. But in reality, the world "viral" is often used to refer to any self-replicating phenomenon, biological, technological or otherwise. In the case of marketing, it refers to any kind of promotional campaign that relies on consumer endorsement to gain momentum and exposure.

Though computer viruses have been running wild since the dawn of the information age, the idea of "media viruses" didn't come around until the popular techno-culture critic Douglas Rushkoff coined the phrase in the mid-'90s. The term refers to the exponential spread of ideas over the web through improved, accessible media channels in a way analogous to the rapid spread of real viruses in a biological population: explosive and sweeping, with a lasting effect.

At the time, Rushkoff's vision of media viruses catapulting critical thought over the Internet was heady and optimistic: he considered media viruses -- be they in the form of footage of the Rodney King beatings or rumours of counterculture bars promoting "smart drugs" -- to be naturally resistant to oversimplified, mainstream dogmas by virtue of the fact that they had to be thought-provoking if they were to be absorbed and relayed to others. In Rushkoff's cyber-future, advanced media communications and word-of-mouth would filter out stale ideas and accelerate the evolution of new ones, part of a grand cultural and social evolution.

But it didn't take long before his idealism was taken down a notch. In 1999, he confessed in an interview for the intellectual website The Edge that he felt the self-regulating "datasphere" he once envisioned was as vulnerable to exploitation as anything else.

"I suddenly realized that the people who had put my books on best-seller lists were not those Mondo 2000-era hackers and Internet homesteaders I so admired, but rather the public relations and advertising industries," he said. "I had been selling 'cool' to corporate America. My books were primers, required texts for young executives on how to take advantage of new media to do the same old thing they were doing before. That's when I realized that we were in an arms race and that I was just as caught up in it as everyone else."

It was around this time that the term viral marketing really started to take hold and word-of-mouth started to take on a whole new meaning.

Friends let friends validate

Sean Moffitt is a rare kind of marketing agent: he's a word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM) specialist. His company, Agent Wildfire, is one of two or three buzz-marketing firms working in Canada today, and started up only about two-and-a-half years ago. But in contrast to Rushkoff's fearful portrayal of parasitic advertising agents, he seems quite amiable and transparent about what he does and what his company is trying to achieve.