Fourth International Conference on Communication & Media Studies

Abstract

Viral marketing involves creating electronic content such as a video or text message and “seeding” it to initially targeted persons (Ho and Dempsey 2010), who then, are expected to view and forward said content to others in their network(s). In cases where the content is forwarded from one set of receivers to others and very quickly reach a large group of persons at an exponential rate (Palka and Pousttchi 2008), diffusion is considered to be viral (Hoang and Lim 2012). In this paper, we aim to present a discussion of our investigation of virality success. In particular, our study will focus on successful propagation of the message such that virality is achieved. Wiedemann (2007) found that viral campaigns are most successful when they are seeded with consumers who have strong ties with the message originator. Given the goal of reaching exponentially large numbers of recipients, and the recommendation to avoid forwarders with large numbers of contacts based on the potential for weak ties, we ask the following question: How can marketers overcome the effect of weak ties to achieve viral propagation of their content? Our investigation involves a review of the viral marketing success literature as well as of relevant theories to develop a research model that will guide our investigation of the key challenges related to this question. We conduct a case study to investigate our model propositions.