Managing Viral Marketing

There is an interesting post over the Experience Curve blog titled “3 Rules for Managing Viral Marketing”.

“Clearly marketers are trying out viral marketing with varying degrees of success, and more often than not these forays end in failure. I don’t think these failures come from marketers not being smart, lack of investment, or bad execution, I think it comes from thinking like a marketer. What I mean by that is traditional marketing theory and methods developed over the last 50 years are antithetical to Viral Marketing”.

There are many similarities between managing marketing and managing innovation in our fast paced, information based society. Marketers will need to revise their assumptions regarding how people interact with advertising just like managers will need to revise their assumptions regarding how customers adopt innovations.