Ecommerce Trends: Viral Marketing For years, businesses have understood the power of word of mouth advertising; both positive and negative. Enough negative feedback from unhappy customers can have a devastating impact, and it's obviously desirable for people to spread the word about the positive attributes of a company's product or service. Yet until recently, while businesses have certainly paid attention to popular buzz, marketing campaigns have not been planned primarily, or entirely, to get people to “spread the word.” E-commerce has changed the game. A form of word-of-mouth marketing known as viral marketing has proven to be an effective strategy in e-commerce. The term “viral marketing” describes any tactic aimed at encouraging people to spread the message in ever-widening circles. This article will explore this trend through the @ of an Internet article titled “The Six Simple Principles of Viral Marketing” (Wilson, 2000); and an overview of how these principles were applied in a successful viral marketing plan by Hotmail.com. The Six Principles The six principles described by Wilson (2001) are: "1) delivers products or services, 2) enables effortless transfer, 3) scales easily from small to large, 4) leverages common motivations and behaviors , 5) uses existing communication networks and 6) leverages the resources of others Hotmail.com has used all of this and managed to establish itself as the largest independent email provider on the Internet. It's useful to consider the large (seemingly infinite) number of advertisements seen on the Hotmail.com website. The value of advertising space increases with each new email account offered by Hotmail.com. ...... middle of paper ...... computers already owned and used by the account holders All Hotmail.com had to do was provision the mail servers and start the viral process using a. small push to several thousand Internet users. After that, all that was left was to wait for the campaign to do its job. Conclusion Viral marketing is a strategy that can be used by almost any e-commerce business. It doesn't have to be an Internet service like Hotmail.com. Any website that offers a free product or service, accompanied by the disclaimer that the user must be willing to accept a link or offer a recommendation, is likely to significantly increase its site traffic. This is comparable to what Perreault and McCarthy (1999) describe as pulling, which involves using a promotion to encourage customers to request a product. An increase in traffic and potential customers would be beneficial for any business.