Achoo...!!

Viral Marketing. Quick, tell me what the first thing that came to your head was when you read that two word phrase. I can tell you that it sounds like a scam to me. When I first heard about viral marketing I got kind of suspicious about what kinds of things I would find when Google searching for it. It is kind of funny because it is actually pretty easy to define. It is exactly what its name says. Marketing that is done through other websites and is linked to you like a virus. You see it is any kind of ad that is on another person’s page and is accessible as a side bar or similar circumstances.



Face book, MySpace, and numerous other community connecting services are targets for such techniques. One benefit to letting viral marketing happen is the fact that advertisers tend to reimburse for using your page to market off of. It’s kind of a cool way to make some extra cash or even get your own name out there. Another big effect of this marketing strategy is the snowball effect. Many emailing people like to forward messages from one to another. These simple ads tend to spread like an epidemic with all of the internet users out there. If you can just get one client to buy a product out of let us say ten people, then your marketing was not wasted. You just made a ten percent customer bump rate in where you just jumped business by ten percent. Your pyramid scheme can only get bigger and all it took was a simple advertisement. The internet has grown how buying and selling can work. Our products can now be sent anywhere in the world. Names and businesses can now have the opportunity to grow exponentially as well as boosting our falling economy.




There are also the bad events that Viral Marketing can cause. Who really wants to press those annoying captions floating somewhere on your computer screen. Sometimes we consider these potentially good ads to being spam. Spam can sometimes have bad viruses in them causing consumers to just stay away from any marketing altogether. I know that pressing some ads can let loose Trojan viruses which can end up crashing your computer system. This is what critics call a thin line that viral marketing has taken. It is not a new concept, but a concept that has evolved into computer language. It just means spreading the news about a product by word of mouth. The thin line can be quite small for the fact that you really never know if a particular ad is going to have good effects on your life or bad ones. I mean, do you want to spend the short time of opening something up or the long time and countless hours fixing the mess. I myself have accidently clicked on these ads. They often reel you in by saying free this and free that.

I guess I feel like saying, ”Don’t take my word for it.”

Rift Fournier

I was thinking, wow I had a wonderful time listening to Mr. Rift Fournier speak. I mean, here is a guy who has been everywhere and has done everything and well now he is speaking to us as a class. I love to listen to my elders because of all the stories and wisdom that they can share with me as well as giving me advice on what might and might not work in life. The key word here is advice. I’m 26 now and I have been not the best at taking others advice. I am kind of stubborn when it comes to that. I have made a few mistakes in my short life time but I find the best ways to learn something is to just take someone else’s word for it if they tell me to find something you love and stick with it. Don’t take your eyes off of something you love to do. I have heard this numerous times in my life, but Rift has just repeated what I needed to hear. My dream job isn’t mass communications. I have picked this field for the fact that I can’t get through math. I love business and selling. I also love the medical world. My degree I am working on right now is in advertising and right now I know that I can use that toward what my dream job will be. Listening to Rift Fournier speak about going through so many different paths in education and finally picking his one love really gave me a heads up. A person should do what they love and not do it just for the money. He also said that I’ll probably change my mind again for what I want to do in the future. I just really enjoyed hearing such wonderful and funny stories. I am taking a class in electronic media next semester with Rift, so I can’t wait to hear more of his wisdom. Rift Fournier is indeed someone who has lived a full life and I hope I can maybe match some of his stories some day!