Viral Marketing Success Means Thinking Like a Venture Capitalist Or Studio Executive, Says Expert

Viral Marketing expert David Meerman Scott, author of "The New Rules of Marketing & PR: How to use news releases, blogs, podcasts, viral marketing & online media to reach your buyers directly," says creating viral marketing campaigns involves suffering many flops for each success.

Lexington, MA (PRWEB) June 1, 2007 -- For marketers, one of the coolest things about the Web is that when an idea takes off, it can propel a brand or company to fame and fortune. For free. Whatever you call it -- viral, buzz or word-of-blog marketing -- having other people tell your story drives action. According to David Meerman Scott, who has been named to the MarketingSherpa Viral Marketing Hall of Fame for the past two years in a row, and is the author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR: How to use news releases, blogs, podcasts, viral marketing & online media to reach your buyers directly (http://www.davidmeermanscott.com/books.htm), creating a successful viral marketing campaign is very difficult.

"Many viral phenomena start innocently," Scott says. "Somebody creates something -- a funny video clip, a cartoon or story -- to amuse friends and one person sends it to another and that person sends it to yet another, on and on."

Scott says that while it is difficult to purposely create viral marketing buzz, it is certainly possible. "The way to create viral programs is a lot like the way venture capitalists invest in start-up companies and studios create films," he says. "A typical VC has a formula that states that most ventures will fail, a few might do OK, and one out of twenty or so will take off and become a large enterprise that will pay back investors many times the initial investment. Record companies and movie studios follow the same principles, expecting that most of the projects that they green-light will have meager sales but that the one hit will more than pay back the cost of a bunch of flops. It's the same with viral marketing campaigns."

Scott says that the biggest problem is that nobody knows with certainty which movie or venture-backed company in the portfolio will succeed, so it requires a numbers game of investing in many prospects. And that's the key to viral marketing. "I always tell people to create a bunch of viral campaigns, promote them like crazy and see what hits. When you see success, then nurture the winner along."

Scott's book "The New Rules of Marketing & PR: How to use news releases, blogs, podcasts, viral marketing & online media to reach your buyers directly" features a foreword by Robert Scoble, Vice President Media Development at PodTech.net, co-author of Naked Conversations, and one of the world's most popular bloggers at Scobleizer.com and is available wherever business books are sold. ISBN: 0-470-11345-6

David Meerman Scott is an online thought leadership (http://www.davidmeermanscott.com/) strategist and viral marketing expert. The programs he has developed have won numerous awards and are responsible for selling over one billion dollars in products and services worldwide. Scott has been named to MarketingSherpa's Viral Marketing Hall of Fame two years in a row. He is also an instructor for Pragmatic Marketing and he has lived and worked in New York, Tokyo, Boston, and Hong Kong and has presented at industry conferences and events in over twenty countries on four continents. Check out Scott's ideas on his own popular marketing blog (http://www.webinknow.com/).

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