E-pidemic

Let's say you're bored at work. It's a slow day, perhaps the weather is not so good. Maybe the office has emptied out for a conference or a trade show, and you're all by your lonesome in your cubicle, with only the silence to accompany you. You go on YouTube or Google Video to entertain yourself. Eventually, something catches your eye. A really quirky little clip amuses you; it does so for no particular reason--it's just catchy. At the bottom of the clip, there is a URL. You type it into the address bar of your browser and the page loads. Congratulations: you've been infected.

The current ubiquity of broadband connections and content-sharing sites has transformed the internet into a viral marketers' Shangri-La. Clickstream growth has gone from being incremental to exponential, helped in part by the phenomenon known as Social Media Optimization, whereby site and clip links can easily be added to social bookmarking networks like del.icio.us or digg.com. In this way, web users, involved in the most mundane and perfunctory of online activities, can become massive propagators. Against this viral outbreak, there is hardly any inoculation, as even the most hardened technophobe can unwittingly pass along a link buried deep in an e-mail forward.

But who's in charge here? Or, to phrase it differently: once a viral idea or message gets out into a network with a nearly limitless ambit, like the internet, can anybody really exercise authority over it? More concretely, the marketer conceivably runs the risk that his clip might mutate, by modification, infringement, or distortion, and become something totally different. In a sense, once the viral idea has been released into the internet, it might no longer respond to the will of its creator; rather, it might evolve in a manner consistent with its own survival. All of this was foreshadowed years ago by British evolutionary scientist Richard Dawkins in his book "The Selfish Gene." In it, he posited that units of information, which he termed memes, behave like genes of the mind and seek to afforce and replicate themselves through selective mutation. What's critical to note here is that, according to Dawkins' theory, the unit of information acts like a virus, insensitive to the will of its host--the human brain.

Is this far-fetched? To some it might be. But it raises one interesting question: when marketers unleash viral campaigns on the internet, who or what is in control? Is it them, or is it the message?