Viral Marketing

The marketing gurus have been saying it for a while now. If you want to sell your product, you need customer evangelists - people so passionate about what you're offering, that they do the selling for you. Word-of-mouth, recommendations, enthusiasm and loyalty - with no more effort on your part than a brilliant product, fantastic customer service and a willingness to interact.

I'm listening to customer evangelism happening right now in the next room.

There's a new PC game due out, Spore. It's due out next year in August - not this year. Yet already there is a huge fan base. Head over to YouTube, type in "spore" and you'll get 529 clips available (and growing!) - not talking clips made by people about it, but actual clips showing the game - to watch. Clips of what, you ask? The guy who created it (Will Wright), who is passionate about it, showing how it works to an audience. Robin Williams messing around with it. Glitches and "oops, what happened there!" along with the tricks and tweaks of showing how it functions. Much humour thrown in, personal experience, hands-on demo's. All on YouTube.

That's not all. There's the Spore Forums. The first forum the kid has ever joined up with and interacted on. He's developed his own ID, password, online personality - all without my help or input. He's dived in to adding "eggs" to his signature, which hatch into surprise creatures after a set time. And all of the users are constantly talking Spore.

Thanks to all the info available, they know how it works, how to run it, and can't wait to get their itching fingers on it.

There's screenshots and mini-movies online. The local internet cafe had a preview demo running.

I admit it's a brilliant game. It allows you to create whatever fantastical creatures you wish, animates them perfectly, then gets you sending them out on missions to different worlds. I've just watched one interaction (demo) with "aliens" who weren't the friendliest - so the controller nuked their planet.. :-) Yeah, not the most peaceful of games, but one that seemingly has no end. As you play, it develops and grows. Something more games should be doing.

But back to the marketing.

The game is a YEAR away from release, and already they've secured customers who are saving up their allowances and upgrading their graphics cards in anticipation!

Heck... it's even got a potential customer's mother blogging about it :-)

Now imagine if you took your product to YouTube, gave it to people to play with and post videos of what they've discovered - good and bad. Took their feedback and tweaked it to perfection before you even released it to the masses. Gave it to a few folk to try and spread the word. Encouraged them to set up fan forums and discussion boards, handed it to the bloggers, and let them do whatever version of show-and-tell they needed to - simply standing back and allowing the word to spread. By the time you made it available, you'd have a ready-made loyal base of people eager to get their hands on what you're selling.

That is viral marketing. It's brilliant, and it's the future of sales.