Viral Marketing or Spam

Some call it viral marketing others call it spamming and its a never ending debate but nevertheless all the major success stories from Hotmail to Facebook and their viral growth have come out of unsolicited emails. Noah tells the story of of start of all the social networks

• MySpace used their ResponseBase email marketing list of 100 million+ people to send for first users.
• Facebook spammed all the Harvard email lists to get the first 2,000 users in a day.
• Hi5 used their previous dating site to send a considerable amount of traffic to.
• Bebo used their original site BirthdayAlarm.com to have a huge user base to start with.
• Friendster and Orkut, started naturally and virally through a very limited invite system.

Just a thought that now if you send these same emails the clickthrough rates and the viral effects will not be the same as before and that is what they call being the first to market with an idea.