Viral Marketing

David Meerman Scott's entertaining and stimulating talk at the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) annual meeting today shamed me into updating my blog. His ideas on emphasizing viral marketing over big-bucks traditional marketing campaigns are probably no surprise to fans of the Guerilla Marketing books by Jay Conrad Levison.

Essentially, Scott advocates using web communities and segmentation strategies to create a self-generating buzz. Content begets search engine exposure, so the theory goes, and search engine exposure begets sales (at the appropriate point along the process.)

The idea is to shift marketing resources away from what he calls interuption marketing (TV and print ads) towards search engine marketing, where a combination of good content and smart optimization techniques give customers what they want when they are looking for it.

Sounds good to me.