Viral marketing involves creating and sharing engaging content that spreads organically through social networks. It can have a much larger impact than traditional advertising. Effective viral content is useful, entertaining, surprising, thought-provoking or tells a good story to motivate people to share it voluntarily. Government agencies can utilize viral marketing by creating content that appeals to influencers and encourages easy sharing across blogs, forums, email lists and social networks.

1. Outreach for the 21st Century: Viral Marketing for Government

2. Health Marketing involves creating , communicating , and delivering health information and interventions using customer-centered and science-based strategies to protect and promote the health of diverse populations (CDC, 2005). Health Marketing

3. CDC 2.0 Communications Strategy

4. Do you understand viral marketing? http://www.timboucher.com/journal/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/viral-marketing.gif

5. What is viral? Everyone wants to see it, and when they do, they all want to share it.

6. What is Viral Marketing? The term was coined by Jeffrey F. Rayport,a Harvard Business School professor, and popularized by phenomenal success of Hotmail who used viral marketing to get popular. From: http://homeforprofits.com/internet-marketing/viral-marketing/viral-marketing-the-virus-act-of-marketing/

7. What is viral marketing? Viral marketing is a marketing phenomenon that facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message voluntarily . Viral promotions may take the form of email, video clips, interactive games, ebooks, software, images, text messages, etc. From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_marketing

8. Natural Human Behavior It is claimed that a satisfied customer tells an average of three people about a product or service he/she likes, and eleven people about a product or service which he/she did not like. From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_marketing Viral marketing has always existed, but internet and social media have magnified the impact.

9. Average Number of Friends : 164 Median Number of Friends: 132 Social Media Utilize Existing Networks http://buzzcanuck.typepad.com/agentwildfire/2007/10/facebook-averag.html http://www.whatsnextblog.com/archives/social_media_chart_small.jpg

10. Viral Video Ad Interest According to an October 2008 report by Feed , 72.1% of ad agency executives surveyed said their clients were “interested” or “very interested” in using viral video.

11. Viral Impact “ Viral marketing can have 500-1000 times greater impact than what you get from regular advertisements.” From:http://www.baekdal.com/articles/Branding/viral-marketing-tricks/ “ The potential for exponential growth is tremendous, and a strong campaign can reach millions of people. ” From:http://totalaccess.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1006659&Ntt=viral&No=35&xsrc=article_head_sitesearchx&N=0&Ntk=basic

12. Viral Content Needed People need to read and share your content before it can go viral! Thus, it needs to be: extremely useful funny shocking thoughtful a great story… http://brandautopsy.typepad.com/brandautopsy/images/2008/05/13/hugh_on_wom.png

13. Make Me Laugh!

14. Surprise Me!

15. Make Me Think!

16. Tell Me a Story!

17. eCards shared with family, friends, co-workers Over 25,000 Opened one card Over 180,000 viewed or opened a CDC eCard One Card Sent 2,113 times Viral Spread of CDC Health-e-Cards

18. Viral Spread of CDC Widgets Over 18M Page Views Over 20,000 Web sites

19. Blogger Outreach

20. Promotion Strategy: Appeal to Leaders How to Become Most Viewed: Blogs: Reach out to relevant blogs and pinpoint “influencers.” Forums: Start new threads and embed videos. Email lists: Send the video to email lists (govdelivery, listservs etc.). Social Networks: Reach out to your social networks, and encourage your friends to reach out to their online friends. Friends: Ask your other friends to view and send to their friends via email or social networks… From: http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/22/the-secret-strategies-behind-many-viral-videos/

21. Viral Marketing Tips: Encourage Sharing Sharing is what viral marketing is all about. That means that you need allow people to easily: Download the content, in a usable format (videos in MPG, pictures in JPG etc.) Embed the content on their own sites (consider bandwidth issues) Send it to friends, either using a link or by sending the content directly. Publish on a number of places, like YouTube, Osciso, etc.

22. Ann Aikin Health Communications Specialist NCHM, Division of eHealth Marketing, Interactive Media Branch [email_address] Thank You!