Angela Wright

Viral Marketing in Tertiary Level Educational Establishments: Breaking Through the 'noise' and 'clutter' Angela Wright

Technological evolutions, principally developments social technologies, have introduced new marketing paradigms, such as viral marketing. Viral marketing offers marketing practitioners significant opportunities to reach target audiences in a credible and attention grabbing way. Reaching students in tertiary level education has for marketers become a challenging undertaking. Traditional on-campus marketing communication tools have become fragmented and cluttered. Students frequently disregard these media, or, fail to become aware of them as they filter out marketing paraphernalia from their consciousness due to the incessant proliferation of organisations targeting them. Students have rapidly adopted social technologies, and they use these media to enrich existing offline personal relationships that they have with friends. Students have a predilection to forward messages to friends, and value messages they receive from friends. The quintessential viral marketing campaign will enable the on-campus marketer to rapidly disseminate a marketing message through electronic word-of-mouth or, ?word-of-mouse?, and ultimately generate product, or service, awareness among student bodies.