When we talk about viral marketing we are referring to the way we make a product responsible, and not a bounce effect, of a person talking to another about this product. And what this generates, is good to build the brand and helps in a positive way position the brand in the mind of the consumer.

If the brands or the companies achieve certain relevance they are exposed to this Viral Marketing, whether they want it or not. They are always exposed to the opinion of consumers and them expressing the positive and negative feelings about their relationship with the brand. Unless the brand is not perceived at all by the client, in this case we have a greater problem.

Having all this interaction, and they being out of our control, it doesn’t mean that a brand can not have a bearing on it  and do things to improve the perception of it, accelerate the communication rhythm, facilitate the process, and stimulate the communication between the satisfied customers and find a way to reverse the unsatisfied ones.

The first step a brand manager should take is to understand how viral marketing works and the different factors that integrate the communication between users. A good start point would be ¨Unleashed the ideavirus¨, quoting Seth Goding again, it a very easy book to read, that’s been around the industry for quite some time. It was one of the clarifying contributions in an area full of confusion and that it is still preserving the fundamentals value, even though some cases are not current anymore. 
 PDF unleashed the ideavirus- Seth Godin (go to the Spanish version to see PDF) Nowadays, marketing 2.0 (Mktg20) is full of opportunities where companies can start talking to their clients, and where the can motivate the client to a be the co-brand manager of the company in its environment, where the client defines what the company communicates him, the same way he used to do it with his friends, but now, through the Internet, amplified and taken to other levels that were unthought-of of in past times.
Brands need to learn how to develop communication learning with this new media and a practical way to illustrate this learning process is what Chevrolet is doing.
 Chevrolet is asking the general audience to make their own spot and send it to them. In this first action they did it with their SUV Tahoe. The received spots have gone over the 30,000.

Although most of the videos seen are very critical and ironic, like the one talking about needing an extra salary to pay for the gasoline that this car uses or the one that alerts about global warming illustrating it with SUV images.
 

  This phenomenon allows a relevant brand to be influenced positively as well as negatively and with a stronger impact each time. It may be that the first impulse could be initiated by the consumer or the brand itself but it is critical that the brand understands how to work with it.
 

It is the consumer who shares today the position of brand manager where he can promote or punish a brand, and where viral marketing is every time more virulent and amplified. It wouldn’t be strange that in short term period we would be talking about marketing pandemic.