This is basically a retort to what Lain Thomson subjectively reported on www.Vnunet.com. No beef with Lain, but HP is off their viral marketing rocker chair!

According to HP’s Social Computing Lab research into social actions of Internet users on such services like Facebook or YouTube, Viral Marketing may not be dead, but it barely has a pulse. They suspect that because users only interact with in two to three subgroups no matter how many friends they have, this may be the cause for many failed viral marketing campaigns.  

Could it be true? Is Viral marketing dead? 

There is some marketing executive crying, “It was really, really good, it was a mega wicked viral campaign that just didn’t spread!” Now HP has given every failed marketing campaign an excuse, as opposed to saying it was just a real bad viral marketing campaign, or it was snuffed out by something better.

Viral marketing is not dead, nor will it ever be.  

On YouTube or Facebook, you have milliseconds to grab a user’s attention, and sometimes marketing executives mess up and miss their mark…period. They only thing that I can see that HP got partially right was that momentum has to be gained in the first day, and that’s logical for a campaign  to have immediate and exponential growth.

Viral Marketing Lives On… and marketing executives everywhere will forever be in pursuit of those crazy ideas such as the One Red Paper Clip, the Milliondollar Homepage, Mentos & Diet Coke! Dan’s has a pretty good list of viral campaigns here to read upon: http://danzarrella.com/examples-of-viral-marketing-campaigns.html