Viral marketing includes marketing strategies that leverage social media to swiftly propagate and explode marketing message to millions of prospects in no time. Viral marketing campaigns are an ideal choice for creating a titanic buzz and brand awareness in a cost effective manner.

Here are some popular viral marketing campaigns that caught maximum eyeballs:

Simplicity Works!

Take a look at this ‘How to Sell a Soap’ video that shows how implementing viral marketing can transform a tough marketing challenge into a cakewalk! The video was a grand success for the Germany based company that promoted it.

What’s Free?

Anything, from information to coupons, services to software, customers love what is free. Attaching freebies to any campaign is the simplest way to catch maximum eyeballs. Take for example, the case of Hotmail. Way back in 1996, Hotmail pioneered what is viral marketing today. Each email sent from a Hotmail account included a small, subtle ad for Hotmail- a strategy that yielded 500,000 registered users. The number reached 12,000,000 users in less than a year’s time. As the user-base expanded into the millions, Hotmail had millions of these free ads floating on the Internet across the globe!

Surfing to Attention!

This staged video on dynamite surfing brought a whopping 10 million views for Quicksilver and did a great job by making the brand immensely popular in no time.

Go creative

In a unique campaign to promote a tax website, marketers staged a theft of Nascar with the website’s address and managed to get almost $1 million worth of exposure on television, absolutely free of cost within a few days.

The Celeb Touch

The Nike video showing Ronaldinho taking a delivery of a new pair of boots and performing some amazing football tricks brought 23.5 million views.

Interact and Instigate

The Burger King - Subservient Chicken is one of the oldest pieces of viral marketing around. The unique interactivity of writing in a message box what you wanted the chicken to do and it would seemingly do it was an instant hit and within 24 hours of launching the campaign received a million hits. The number reached 20million within a week. In a year the viral received around 14,000,000 unique visitors and helped promote the new sandwich. Here’s a video of the interactive chicken:

The rules are simple- be creative, clear and compelling. Instigate something that arouses interest and see your message transform into a gigantic viral for promoting your brand.

Twitter presents a great opportunity for smart marketers to meet the needs of information hungry customers. By sharing relevant and convincing content through Twitter, marketers can succeed in creating strong brand relationships with their prospects. But, Twitter is vast and if your content is not strong enough, it may easily get lost in the crowd.

Here are some easy tips to strengthen your content marketing efforts on Twitter:

Scribe Concisely

Tweet with brevity to deliver greater value. Remember that you have only 140 words to express yourself. Share your best ideas with brevity and clarity.

Get Talking

Be a part of all relevant discussions about your industry, products and services. Twitter provides tools like TweetGrid and TweetDeck which can be used to monitor ongoing conversations in real time and respond to them instantaneously.

Go Trendy

Staying current is critical. By using Twitter Search and Monitter you can keep an eye on what’s happening right now in topic areas that are relevant for you.

Form Groups

Create and become member of groups that are relevant to your business. Within the group, you can focus on specific topics that are important to your prospects and customers. You may use Tweetworks to create ad hoc groups on Twitter.

Tweet Your Blog

Promote your blog posts on Twitter through Twitterfeed, a tool that can seamlessly publish your latest blog post to Twitter.

Follow the tips and leverage Twitter to communicate with your customers and prospects differently. It’s time to move beyond simple selling of products and services and deliver tangible benefits to your target audiences through content that matters to them!

Professional, responsible and sophisticated- are the key factors that define corporate blogs. Different from generic blogs, corporate blog designs are more classy and uncomplicated.

Here is a collection of ten most popular corporate blog designs that are a perfect blend of style, simplicity and branding:

Yahoo

Google

Nike

Dell

Cisco

Walmart

Design Matters

Johnson & Johnson

McDonalds

GM

Blogging is a raging web trend and with more and more people trying hands at it, sailing through the cut throat competition gets tougher by the day. The key to survival lies in implying technical innovations that pull the blog through a down phase.

When you see your blog traffic slipping, don’t panic. Instead, imply this five point strategy to perk up your blog during a slowdown:

Socialize your posts

Link, Digg, Tweet or Stumble some of your posts to create a buzz. Share your posts through your network on social media sites and attract viewers to your blog.

Revitalize the dead headings

Even the most engaging articles may fail to attract eyes if they suffer a poor heading. Slowdown is the best time to analyze posts that were not well received and give them a facelift with a new heading or introduction. Be a SEO pro and use keywords in your headings and intros that rank your blog high during relevant searches.

Follow suite

Check out what is selling the best and follow the trend. Simply following what readers are liking and blogging about it can be a very effective traffic booster. Whether it is an outfit, person, place or concept, if it’s a hit, it should be on your blog too.

Blockbusters that weren’t

You perceived some of your posts as stalwarts, but your readers thought otherwise. May be it was a case of wrong timing, may be you did not use the right key words, or may be you simply chose a wrong subject. Dig your blog archive for such posts and refurbish them. Give them a contemporary touch and calibrate them with the SEO tools. Edits may give some boost to these posts, as well as to your blog.

Set the timing right

Survey and analyze the time that people tend to spend over reading blogs. It could be weekends or working days. See what the trend for your genre is and set the frequency of your posts accordingly. Coming up with a new post every weekend is a good idea. This would not only cover the weekend visitors, but also help in developing a long term habit in your readers for checking your blog every Monday for something new.

With the whole world flocking to the social media sites like Twitter, Digg and LinkedIn, making your business visible on them has become extremely challenging. Social Media Optimization (SMO) is your only chance to remain afloat in a swarming pool of competitors. SMO is novel marketing strategy that has rapidly gained popularity in recent times. The concept is simple, get your website refurbished so that it is easily linkable to social media sites, is found on all popular blogs and podcasts and is extensively bookmarked.

Why Social Media?

A marketing study conducted by WhitePaperSource.com reveals that marketers are increasingly drawn towards social media marketing because it yields better results with lower investment. According to the report, the primary benefits of promoting your business through social media are:

• enormous attention from prospects
• increased number of qualified leads
• fruitful business partnerships
• reduced marketing expenses

Who doesn’t want to see their business grow by leaps and bounds in minimum cost? Social media is a fabulous opportunity for doing this and you should just not miss it!

However, only knowing about it and creating accounts on Twitter and LinkedIn will not get you the desired results. Marketing through social media needs extensive planning and effective SMO to ensure that your business is visible wherever your clients may look for it.

How do I make my SMO activities effective?

The answer is simple- proper planning and a well executed SMO strategy. Optimizing your website to ensure that it qualifies all parameters of social media marketing, coupled with effective management and maintenance of the same is what will get you maximum eye balls.

Here are some tips for a perfect SMO that will get you maximum attention on the Internet:

1.    Increase your linkability – Mobilize your website. Update it regularly and imbibe blogs and whitepapers to enhance its linkability.

2.    Make tagging and bookmarking easy – Tag and bookmark your pages with all popular websites.

3.    Help your content travel – SMO goes beyond modifying structure and content of your website. If you have content that is in portable formats like PDF, audio-video files, PPTs etc, the same can be submitted to sites like YouTube, SlideShare, etc..

4.    Make web friends – Go ahead and exchange content and videos with other websites. Experiment with RSS and facilitate others in driving more traffic towards your web content.

Give your website the SMO power and see its presence grow in every corner of the World Wide Web!

Some people swear by Twitter whilst other just cannot stand it. Both sides make some compelling statements and astute observations.

The Love:

According to a recent Nielsen survey, Twitter has grown 1328% since February 2008. With over 4 million Twitter users answering the simple question - “What are you doing?” Twitter has been transformed from a simple stay-in-touch-with-your-network website to a network building tool being used by businesses, celebrities, political figures, any everyone else in world. People ant to connect with others, get information, ask questions and get instant answers from a diverse population. The best part is the simplicity of design and application, all you need to do is type your message in 140 characters and you have a voice that can be heard by millions.

The Hate:

Not everyone is such a fan! According to another study by Nielsen, 60% of Twitter users do not return after the first month. What is driving away these new users? Are they not giving this application the chance it deserves? Twitter users have complained of many things - excessive downtime, too simple  design, disinterest in sharing all their minute-to-minute updates with the world, followers and followings, following conversations, etc.

The interesting thing is that Twitter (and others) have listened to these problems and have come up with a plethora of applications and website tweaks to address issue and then some! Whether you love it or hate - that is a personal choice, just like who you wish to follow, what you wish to tweet, what short 2 sentence story you wish to share with the world.

So what do you think of Twitter? Love it or hate it?

The latest issue of the Marketing Insider focuses on bringing you some of the latest developments at the intersection of business marketing and social media for effective lead generation. The newsletter provides interesting links to some of the best practices being followed by marketers in the lead generation and social media industries.

Catch the latest buzz, read what the Gurus of the industry are saying, take the poll to see how you match against your peers in terms of your social media expectations of 2009.

Read the latest issue here: Marketing Insider