Going Viral

Viral advertising is using pre-existing social networks to produce brand awareness. The goal is to put a self-replicating message into a system, analogous to the way a computer virus moves through a network. The viral message could be delivered via word of mouth or enhanced through the massive network effects provided by the Internet. A good example of viral marketing would be a funny commercial posted on YouTube; people find it and laugh, then email it to friends, post it to social bookmarking sites (Digg, StumbleUpon) or link to it from their websites. This process is extraordinarily rapid and sometimes a video can go from 10 views to 100,000 in a matter of hours.

Joel Gross actively works with many networks of people online
through social bookmarking sites, forums and blogs, and has
observed (and sometimes started) the viral marketing effect.
He is currently working on an academic quality paper
describing the passage of an idea through groups of people.