Viral Marketing & The Open Coffee Club

The Open Coffee Club, Bangalore describes itself as a “an open forum for Entrepreneurs, VC’s and budding Entrepreneurs to come together and connect with each other at the grass root level”. While I am no entrepreneur yet, I do hope to start up something in the next few months. So, when I heard from my friend, Rashmi about this Club meeting every forthnight to chew the fat, listen to experts speak and yadda-yadda-yadda, I decided to attend a session.

Today, they had Rashmi delivering a talk on “Viral Marketing for Start-ups”. Rashmi is the founder of Altius Consulting, a marketing consultancy that caters to starts-ups and SMEs. How hot a topic viral marketing is could be seen from the size of the audience - entrepreneurs and would-be entrepreneurs kept walking in, until the small restaurant we were meeting in, was almost full.

A very interactive session, at times, it seemed as though the volley of questions from the audience would take over the talk itself! But, we did manage to come away with some pretty useful ideas, especially for those who haven’t really explored this kind of marketing before.

Some of the key takeouts for me were:

• Viral marketing is fundamentally different from mainstream marketing, in one aspect - it is non-intrusive and comes from someone you know and trust.
• Hearing about products and services from people you know, has always been around - what we call ‘Word of mouth’. Technology has however made it easier for marketers to create and monitor this word of mouth.
• Viral marketing is not a substitute for product differentiation; a me-too product, a yet-another-social-networking-portal cannot just bank on buzz. Creating this differentiation is therefore the start-up’s first task
• You need to identify what is known as a “hive” in viral marketing parlance : a homogenous segment that is likely to be really interested in your product/service. This is in any case, true for all marketing efforts.
• All jargon aside, if you create a message that you want others to pass on, you have to make it easy for them to do it. If they can’t do it in one step, they are unlikely to do it.

Once Rashmi finished her talk, start-ups got some time to talk to her on specific problems applicable to each of them. These ranged from “Should I as a founder be the one doing the viral marketing?” to “How do I use it for a B2B industry?” to “How do I measure the ROI on various kinds of marketing efforts?”

Overall, a morning well spent. One thing which I came away with, and which would probably be useful to others in start-up mode was that Viral Marketing is not necessarily for all situations, nor is it useful just because of the (relatively) low cost. There has to be something to engage the user - if that is absent, don’t do it!

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Tags: Bangalore, business, Entrepreneurship, marketing, viral marketing