Posted By Terence Thomas
Interactive Marketing Manager, BIA Information Network
Email: tthomas@activeaccess.com

Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Terence Thomas, and I’m the Interactive Marketing Manager for BIA Information Network. I assist our clients in successfully using their ActiveAccess applications to create communicate and build strong, social connections with their audiences.

Back in November 2007, I was chosen to sit on a panel at the Ad-Tech Interactive marketing conference in NYC (http://www.ad-tech.com) where we discussed Word of Mouth (WOM) or Viral Marketing.

We had about 100 people in attendance and we spent the hour answering questions such as:

· Is the word “Viral” still relevant?

· Can something be made viral?

· What have been our experiences with Word of Mouth marketing?

· What are some tips that we can share in creating a viral campaign?

Everyone on that panel talked about viral videos, viral campaigns, viral zombie bites on Myspace pages, but I took a different approach. In explaining my experience with going “viral” I shared the following:

1. Going viral does not always mean your content (blog, video, e-mail, etc.) needs to be shocking, funny, or over the top in order to be compelling. You just want people to talk about your content with others.

2. For something to be viral, you need the following elements:

· an audience

· a compelling or relevant piece of content for that audience

· to teach your audience how to pass this compelling content on to others

· the audience to actually pass the content on to friends/family/colleagues, and

· to have the ability track the referrals

All this leads me to the ActiveAccess content delivery channel.

ActiveAccess has a word of mouth feature called “Share With A Friend” (SWAF). All “referrals” through SWAF are tracked, so if I send you an “invite” to download the app and you sign-up, download and run the app, your name is recorded in a database and I’m listed as the one who referred you. This is a tremendous benefit to our customers, because not only can they spread the application virally, they know who is helping to perform that task. This means they can develop and execute marketing campaigns around this feature – rewarding the best viral marketers from among their users.

Based on our research we are finding that almost every client has some amount of success regarding the use of the SWAF feature. We’ve noticed that the feature, when used, has a whopping average close to 80%. That’s HUGE in the world of viral marketing! This means that 8 out of 10 referral messages that users sent to friends and family encouraging them to sign-up and download the app, actually led to application downloads and later, use of the application.

We are trying to keep this momentum going through more training and awareness about the SWAF feature.

Imagine…. Instead of our clients doing all the heavy lifting to marketing their desktop applications, our clients can nearly double their user base by asking their audience to share in the task of promoting the app to their friends and family by using the viral marketing feature in their applications.