No abstract

Viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce exponential increases in brand awareness, through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of a computer virus. It can be often word-of-mouth delivered and enhanced online harness the network effect of the Internet and is very useful in reaching a large number of people very fast. The ultimate goal of marketers interested in creating successful viral marketing programs is to create viral messages that appeal to individuals with high social networking potential (SNP) and that have a high probability of being presented and spread by these individuals and their competitors in their communications with others in a short period of time. There are several sources of social networks where our model can be applied to, and a few are: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google+, Instagrams, online forums, email mailing lists.