Advantages and Disadvantages of using Viral Marketing

Low costs, great reach, high credibility, high efficiency are the advantages of viral marketing. A very quick impact at a relatively low cost is the key driver for marketers wishing to use such techniques.

However, there are also a lot of disadvantages, such as brand dilution, association with unknown groups, lack of control, limited possibility of segmentation, and large-scale spam issues.
Brand dilution is that viral marketing depends on people who are not versed in the company's brand to do the "selling" for the brand. Therefore, the message must be carefully crafted, otherwise it may result in misinterpretations and distort the creator's original intent, or make the communication brandless.

Viral marketing's strength is its potential to spread exponentially from person to person. Sometimes it may difficult to control. If the message is passed to someone who is not supposed to be associated with. The viral message would then be perceived as spam and lead to damage to the advertiser's reputation and affect the company image.

Rapping Southwest Flight Attendant

Word-of-mouth marketing has been around for many decades before the Internet. Technology has been creating an intense expansion of such older concept to develop the viral marketing. Viral marketing seeks to exploit the existing social networks to disseminate information. Like the spreading of the epidemic Swine Flu H1N1, viral marketing spreads through viral processes to reach a large number of people rapidly. It is word-of-mouth delivered and enhanced online. (Ref.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_marketing)Below video - the rapping Southwest Flight Attendant, I think is a good example of viral marketing. A passenger on the flight took this video and posted it on youtube. Just by the second day there were over 2000 views. And this was later reported on CNN news(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbR_0hGxfZI&feature=related). This example shows that simple everyday things in life can result in viral marketing, once they are made into something unusual and interesting. Whether sanctioned by Southwest or not, it has undoubtedly raised awareness of Southwest and acted as free publicity. This will have a positive viral marketing impact for the company and will connect with people better than any multi-million dollar commercial ever could.