You’ve heard the latest buzzwords in marketing: so-called “viral marketing.” But before you dismiss them as just that buzzwords take a closer look and see that they could have some use and value for B2B marketers.

The basis of viral marketing has been around for many years. The idea is that you incite your customers or referral sources to pass on something about your business to their network of colleagues and friends. Those that pass on your information get something in return. That something may be a gift or service related to your business or simply the knowledge that they have added value for others.

Now viral or word-of-mouth marketing has become that much hotter because it has a new medium: the Internet. According to one venture capital firm, 80 percent of new business plans have the words “viral marketing” in them. Using e-mail makes it incredibly easy to pass information on to a friend or colleague, especially if it involves something fun or free. With millions using the Internet worldwide, the potential for exponential growth is tremendous. What’s great about viral marketing is that it is low cost and works virtually by itself. Once you make an offer and provide the facility for referrals, viral marketing spreads by itself.

The viral marketing example most commonly sited is Hotmail’s free e-mail. Hotmail offered free e-mail, and to those who signed up they attached a tagline promoting the same to every e-mail sent to friends, family and colleagues. This viral marketing attempt began in July 1996, and, as of July 1999, Hotmail had 40 million users with 150,000 signing up every day.

Viral marketing is not just for the B2C community, as in the Hotmail example. How can B2B providers use viral marketing without sacrificing credibility and quality? Viral marketing can work for B2B providers, as long as the following is true.

First, the product and service has to add value for the transmitter and receiver. Second, the offer has to be deliverable. You don’t want to offer a product that you can’t deliver if demand grows rapidly. Third, the offer has to be easily transferable to others. E-mail and Web pages provide the best medium to facilitate this. Fourth, the best viral marketing campaigns use existing networks to move the message along.

A good B2B viral marketing example is Guru.com. Guru.com e-mailed its database of registered gurus, and asked them to get four colleagues to sign up at Guru.com. The prize: a Guru.com bathrobe. Weeks later a second incentive was offered: get a business to register a “gig” on Guru.com, and win a pair of massaging slippers with the Guru.com logo.

Meeting criteria

Guru.com’s viral marketing met all of the above criteria. The bathrobe and slippers were fun rewards in keeping with Guru.com’s hip work-at-home-in-your-fuzzy-slippers image. The reward was deliverable and scalable. Guru.com used e-mail to send out its message, which allowed the recipients to easily forward the offer to colleagues.

To implement viral marketing at your business, first start with your customer base. Incite existing customers to refer new ones. Second, go to your referral sources. Service providers, your outside network and colleagues can be encouraged to provide referrals that lead to business.

You can offer free hours of your service, an add-on module of your product, or a complimentary product. If you offer a free assessment or analysis for your customers, it just may turn up additional needs that require your expertise. Or, if your customers are typically stressed, tired business-owners, offer a reward that provides relaxation and leisure, like a weekend away or a personal service that will save them time.

Posting articles

One very scalable viral marketing effort is to allow others to post articles that you’ve authored on their Web sites. You should require that they use your copyright information and link back to your site. You don’t have much to lose in allowing this, as visitors already have the ability to cut and paste your words for their use. You can also ask your alliance partners and associates to post articles on your Web site and send their network (via an e-mail message and link) to your site to read them. Traffic to your site and exposure to your products and services can increase with little effort on your part.

Another way to encourage visitors to spread the word about your company is to provide a link or button on each Web page that they can click on to forward your URL. Provide this capability at the end of one of your great articles or pages of information, and you have a very qualified recommendation. You can create your own link or button, or there are utilities available to help you do it. Choose carefully, as some of the utility providers have designed ways to capture the recommender’s e-mail information for other uses.

Recommend-it.com allows you to cut and paste a button to your site. The button allows visitors to enter e-mail addresses and names of others they’d like to refer to your site. Apparently Recommend-it.com’s revenue model is advertising sales for e-zines offered on its site. Recommend-it.com comes with four panels for a recommender to fill out, including areas where they can “opt-in” to free e-zines or be entered in drawings for prizes.

Letemknow.com is a free utility to facilitate recommendations for your Web site. As with Recommend-it.com, you can use its button to allow visitors at your site to enter referrals with whatever message they’d like to send. Letemknow.com claims it doesn’t use the e-mails of recommenders and referrals for any purpose other than to build traffic at your site.

A third resource, Bignosebird.com (http://www.bignosebird.com/cgi.shtml) claims to offer free code for Web designers who want to create their own recommender button. Again, before you use any of these “free” utilities, conduct your own investigation to thoroughly understand what recommenders may be subscribing to when they provide e-mail addresses. You don’t want to subject them to possible “spam” or other invasions of their privacy.

In conclusion, while some may use “viral marketing” as mere buzzwords, there is substance for B2B marketers. You can approach satisfied customers and referral sources in a credible manner and ask them to spread the word. Keep the reward related to your business and appropriate for the size and type of referral. Make sure that your offer adds value for the referrer and for those that are referred to you, and you’ll have a cost-effective marketing tool to grow your business.

Jennifer Beever is a marketing consultant who specializes in B2B marketing for growing businesses. She can be contacted at [email protected].

Entrepreneur’s Notebook is a regular column contributed by EC2, The Annenberg Incubator Project, a center for multimedia and electronic communications at the University of Southern California. Contact James Klein at (213) 743-1759 with feedback and topic suggestions.