By Joe Chung
E-Commerce Times
05/15/09 4:00 AM PT

How do you get your customers to do your marketing for you — and more effectively than you could ever hope to do it yourself? By giving them a great value proposition and making it super-easy for them to pass it on. No gimmicks, no tricks. Viral marketing is all about giving your customers what they really want — and really want to share.

Everyone talks about building an online community that drives “viral” marketing — but how exactly do you accomplish that?

Viral marketing is not about setting up a forum and hoping people will come. It’s not about launching the 3,009th Facebook application that will sink quickly into obscurity. It’s about driving a value chain and meeting a need. Users need to get something in return for what they put in. Discovering and filling a latent need through Twitter , YouTube or Facebook can work fabulously well — but typically only for those who are among the first to figure it out and grab that piece of “experience share.” Once consumers adopt a behavior, it’s hard and expensive to get them to change. A viral campaign, by definition, is supposed to be cheap, because consumers promote the brand on their own accord. [+]