This is NOT Viral Marketing

It’s a Virginia morning in my inbox. Here’s another post about The University:

I just received an email from the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the University of Virginia asking for a donation.  Now, I know that the SEAS has been strapped for cash lately since I had to pay for my own travel costs to guest lecture in a 2nd year class there this fall.  Since there were no speaking fees, I decided that was my contribution for the year and I would reconsider making a donation in the year to come.  The email I received this morning was the following:

Please let me know if you agree: This is NOT viral marketing. Correct? The reason this is not viral marketing is because viral marketing means that the message or content travels through a series of channels that are not always initiated by the original sender. So sending an email to your alumni base, is not considered Viral Marketing, it’s considered Mass Marketing, Mail Marketing, or in this case, Fundraising. In addition, a quick search of viral marketing on google shows the first result:

“Viral marketing is a marketing strategy that encourages email recipients to pass along messages to others in order to generate added exposure.” source

Right, and I do not see the email asking me to forward it on to anyone. Furthermore, if they paid a consulting agency to tell them that “viral” marketing was the next big thing, and all they come up with was this email, I’m certainly not going to give them any money. They just wasted the money they had!

Finally, I get that they are trying to make some joke that Viral Marketing isn’t Science, and they’ll stick to what they are good at: Science. But really that dismisses all the research that has gone into why viral marketing is so effective; this includes very scientific research coming from our nation’s Sociology departments.

Related posts:

1. My First Time Driving Stick
2. XML and Resume Writing
3. A Class I Wish I Could Have Taken