It’s time to administer some penicillin and kill off that overused term of the 1990s, Viral Marketing. 

Why? Because Viral Marketing – the practice of attaching an advertisement to a product, so that users of the product inadvertently spread the company’s message (think ads at the end of email sent from free accounts, or visible logos on clothing) – can be almost as damaging to marketing efforts as email SPAM. With all due respect to Steve Jurvetsen of Draper Fisher Jurvetsen, a fellow GSB alum who’s credited with popularizing the term, Viral Marketing might more accurately have been termed “parasitic marketing”.

Like email, Viral Marketing isn’t in and of itself bad. For certain situations, such as the early days of Hotmail (where the term came to popularity), adding advertising works perfectly. The message was unobtrusive, relatively subtle, and reasonably well targeted – the recipients of the Viral Marketing were very likely to not yet be users of the service.

Yet like email mis-used as SPAM, Viral Marketing can be applied with too little thought and too broad a brush. For example, imagine you were already a Hotmail customer and kept seeing those attached ads – which kept getting larger, and then started advertising other services you used. How would you feel about having ads attached that said “try this cure for herpes, I use it?” (Lest you think that’s farfetched, that’s exactly what search-related email sites are proposing to do, based on assembling preferences from keywords in your email…)

So what’s the solution? I advocate “Collaborative Marketing”. Like Viral Marketing (which was once known as branding, like the Levi’s tag attached to your blue jeans), Collaborative Marketing isn’t a new concept. Versions of it have been used by companies from Avon to Zazzle. But it tends to be more targeted and effective because it engages humans as both filter and recommender, giving your message added validity. Instead of attaching the message for people, you encourage your consumers to pass the message on for you. Collaborative Marketing means adding affinity programs (think “Frequent Flyer Miles”) with “refer-a-friend” bonuses. It means making materials available to your clients so that they can easily refer you to friends. It means proactively asking your clients to make those referrals. In short, it means building relationships with your clients, rather than using them as host carriers for your viral message.