I figure I should I stop my man-love fest for Mark Cuban on my blog for a moment to take a slightly different view of viral marketing from Greg's utopia below.

Viral marketing isn't free and it sure ain't easy.  Yes it can be cheap but creating viral content takes time and money.  A professionally produced outsourced video with a small production shop would cost anywhere from $5k to $50k.  That's a pretty substantial sum of money in marketing plan for anything but a mega-corporation (and having owned my fair share of marketing budgets I can assure you $50k is a chunk o' change).  Let's say it was $50k for blendtec and as a result of the publicity they sold 5,000 units above trend - then the marketing cost per unit would be $10.  That's not exactly spectacular.  Of course, if they sold 50,000 more units $1/unit isn't look so bad.

The challenge with "viral" content is that it is very difficult to predict and given the upfront costs hard to gauge its appropriateness.  Sure if it's a huge hit on youtube and gets 1 million views - that sounds like a great deal for a few thousand dollars.  But what if it was viewed 100 times?  Yikes.  For that $5k, at $0.50 cpm you could have run a banner campaign that hit 10,000,000 users guaranteed.  Food for thought.

Viral content is great, it's just hard to build a business around.  Use it sparingly and treat it as a total flier - ie. treat the effort (resources, dollars, staffing time, etc.) as if you are playing with house money.  And as hollywood folks will be sure to tell - hits are perhaps the most unpredictable thing you can imagine.  No one gets fired for hits, but hollywood is littered with the carcases from flops.