Spot on… I do wish just some of my regular email spammers would take this advice – and spend an hour constructing a targeted, sociable and search friendly campaign, rather than “investing” in multimillion name email lists & blasting away at those.

Five years ago “Viral marketing” started to mean “let’s get a funny piece of video, or game, and send/seed it everywhere we can think of”. That’s old skool, analogue thinking – that funny ads get folks’ attention.

They do, but they don’t always get attention for the product that’s being virally promoted.

Over the next five years I reckon viral marketing, and social, will blend into one common sense approach. Put out information, in places where it’ll be well received, and feed the network nodes that are interested in the topic. The marketer’s job is not just to produce the materials, but also to cultivate the networks in the first place.

Just as you describe