Viral Marketing - Can It Effect Your Employment Brand?

A Three Part Series - The good, the bad and the ugly

Part 1 - The "Good" The impact of a good product experience
Part 2 - The "Bad" The impact of Bad work Environments
Part 3 - The "Ugly" The impact of Lay-off's, Restructures or Downsizing

Absolutely! Viral marketing refers to marketing techniques that use preexisting social networks to produce increases in brand awareness, through self-replicating viral processes. It can be word-of-mouth delivered or enhanced by the network effects of the Internet.

Viral marketing is a marketing phenomenon that facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message voluntarily. Viral promotions may take the form of video clips, interactive Flash games, advergames, ebooks, brandable software, images, or even text messages.

It is claimed that a satisfied customer tells an average of three people about a product or service he/she likes, and eleven people about a product or service which he/she did not like. Viral marketing is based on this natural human behavior.

The goal of marketers interested in creating successful viral marketing programs is to identify individuals with high Social Networking Potential (SNP) and create Viral Messages that appeal to this segment of the population and have a high probability of being passed along.

The term "viral marketing" is also sometimes used pejoratively to refer to stealth marketing campaigns the use of varied kinds of astroturfing both online and offline to create the impression of spontaneous word of mouth enthusiasm.

Ok, so how does it work? First, the "Good"

Today, I received an email from a friend of mine - Subject: Guitar Hero Expert. "Bob, This kid is amazing... He is definitely my guitar hero".

http://kotaku.com/350157/pre+teen-guitar-hero-wails-on-the-ellen-degeneres-show?autoplay=true

So, I clicked on the email and watched the video. Outstanding! This kid was amazing. In fact, I called my two boys in who are avid "Guitar Hero Players" to watch the video. I then forwarded the video to all of my friends.

This was happening all over the country. In fact, this young "Guitar Hero" racked up an impressive 3.8 million hits on his Utube video which later caught the attention of the Ellen DeGeneres show that later yielded a live perform on her show.

Ok, what does this have to do with and how does it impact an employment brand?

The viral marketing wrapped around this 11 year old caused a surge in product popularity. This bodes well for all "brands" involved.

Red Octane, the publisher, developer, and distributor of Guitar Hero, Guitar Hero II, Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s and Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock has been catapulted into the limelight. The success of these products creates demand which impact sales, profits, brand recognition, top of mind awareness, and employment opportunities.

Red Octane has now become the place to be in Sunnyvale, California for young and upcoming software developers.

PlayStation2 computer entertainment system console from Sony Computer Entertainment, Xbox?video game system from Microsoft, and on personal computers ("PC") are also benefiting from the craze both financially and "brand" wise.

The viral hype positioned their corporate brand and proprietary brands in the forefront as leaders in technology and innovation. All important "Brand Attributes" when recruiting top tech talent.

Not to mention the "brand" impact on the video game peripherals and accessories business who have won awards for the Ignition Dance Pad, the Guitar Hero SG Controller, the Wireless Guitar for PS2, the X-plorer Wired Guitar for the Xbox 360, the Kramer Striker Wireless Guitar for PS2 and the Les Paul Guitar for the Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii and PLAYSTATION 3.

As you can see Viral Marketing can impact your brand in many ways and is considered one of the strongest forms of marketing known.

In part 2 and 3 we will explore how this form of marketing can also be an "employment brands" worst nightmare.

Closing note: All of you that clicked the link I provided about, have now participated in a viral marketing movement.

About MYJOBENGINE: http://www.myjobengine.com

MYJOBENGINE.com is the internets first "Employment Branding" job board and marketing tool designed specifically for Corporate Staffing professionals seeking effective and efficient ways to promote their "Employment Brand" and corporate career site.

Chmn., CEO - MYJOBENGINE.COM - http://www.myjobengine.com

Bob is a multi-channel marketing executive with 21 years of diverse Advertising and Marketing experience in CPG, agency and retail environments.

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Virtual Private Networks - The Basics

Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) can extend a local area network (LAN) over the Internet to remote networks and remote client machines. A VPN uses the Internet to route LAN traffic from one location to another by encapsulating the data inside encrypted IP packets. The encrypted packets are unreadable by intermediary Internet devices and can contain any kind of network communications - such as file and printer sharing, e-mail, remote procedure calls, and database access.

VPNs can be setup using server computers, firewalls or routers. Client access to the VPN can be made using client-side VPN software or by connecting to an ISP that supports the VPN protocol.

VPNs solve the problem of accessing private servers over the Internet through a combination of IP encapsulation, cryptographic authentication and data payload encryption.

IP Encapsulation
IP encapsulation provides a way to protect the data while in transit between the remote client and the private LAN. Computers outside the VPN should not be able to snoop on the traffic exchanged between the remote client and private server or be able to insert their own data into the communication stream. This is accomplished by creating what people refer to as a private and protected "tunnel" through the public Internet. When an IP packet contains another IP packet this is called IP encapsulation, and it provides a mechanism to refer to a host within a private network when a direct network connection may not exist. When this is combined with data encryption then we've effectively created our virtual tunnel.

Cryptographic Authentication
Cryptographic Authentication is used to securely validate the identity of the remote client so that the private LAN can determine what level of security should be applied to that user. VPNs use the authentication process to determine whether or not a remote user can participate in the encrypted tunnel, and for exchanging the public key that will subsequently be used for data encryption.

Data Payload Encryption
Data Payload Encryption uses a public key to encrypt the data field of the IP encapsulated packet. That is, data payload encryption is exactly like normal IP except that the data has been encrypted. It does not encrypt the header information, so details of the private network can be gleaned by analyzing the header information.

Advantages and Disadvantages
Compared to Wide Area Networks (WANs), VPNs offer some advantages but, also, present some disadvantages.

 Advantages - cheaper than WANs - easier to setup than WANs Disadvantages - slower than WANs - less reliable than WANs - less secure than isolated WANs 

Example
Although there are a number of ways to configure a VPN here is an example of one scenario that is fairly common -- an employee wishes to work from home and exchange data between their home machine and a private web server on the corporate network. There are two important processes here -- the process of negotiating and building a VPN session, and the process of protecting and handling the data within an existing VPN connection. Here I'll briefly describe the latter and leave the former as a potential topic for a future article.

Suppose we have the following:
(a) a VPN client with a public IP address of 66.123.77.196 and a private IP address of 192.168.0.202 (provided by the corporation's DHCP server).
(b) a VPN server on the corporate network with two interfaces -- a public interface to the Internet that uses 168.156.192.75 and an interface to the private network with an IP of 192.168.0.101
(c) a web server on the corporate network with an IP address of 192.168.0.102

Prior to creating a VPN session the client host has one interface and a connection to the Internet through an ISP. The client machine can communicate with any host on the Internet but can not access the web server on the private network 192.168.0.X. After the VPN session has been created then the client host has 2 interfaces -- the original interface to the Internet and a new VPN interface. The new VPN interface becomes the default gateway -- that is, all packets will initially travel through the new interface. However, the VPN interface is not a physical network card -- it doesn't physically connect to anything. The VPN interface is used to encrypt and encapsulate packets that are subsequently sent as the payload of a new, outer packet. It is the outer packet that is sent out over the Internet (using the original interface) to the corporate VPN server.

The inner packet will use the client's private IP of 192.168.0.202 as the source IP address and the web server's private IP of 192.168.0.102 as the destination address. The VPN client encrypts the data field of the inner packet and this inner packet then becomes the payload of an outer packet. The outer packet uses the client's public IP of 66.123.77.196 as the source IP address and the public interface of the VPN server (168.156.192.75) as the destination IP. The IP encapsulated packet is then sent to the ISP and out over the Internet.

When the IP encapsulated packet reaches the VPN server at the edge of the private network it will unwrap the inner packet and decrypt its data field. Since the VPN server also has an interface to the private network it will then be able to forward the inner packet to the destination web server. When data is sent from the web server back to the client then the process is reversed -- that is, the VPN server handles the encryption/encapsulation and the VPN client is responsible for unwrapping/decoding.

Steve Leytus is a senior software engineer and develops applications for NutsAboutNets.com. For more information about low cost, PC-based diagnostic tools for installing, optimizing and trouble-shooting 802.11 (Wi-Fi) wireless networks please visit http://www.NutsAboutNets.com

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