Non-profit organisations and activists are increasingly turning to viral marketing as a means of spreading their message.

A three-year old Dutch initiative provides the cosiest spot on the Internet to learn about best practices in viral marketing endeavours. Osocio, initially published in Dutch as the “Houtlust Blog”, is now an English-language blog with a team of contributors. It started in 2005.

Updated daily, Osocio provides several useful services. A great place to start is its dictionary. This is a brilliant attempt to clarify the jargon surrounding social media and viral marketing. It’s a great resource to bookmark or even print out for any individual or organisation trying to correctly use the terminology associated with this emerging trend in advertising.

For example: Viral Marketing, the Osocio-nary says, is “a marketing strategy that encourages email recipients to pass along messages to others in order to generate added exposure.”

Simple enough.

Viral marketing is a term often used alongside the terms social advertising or social marketing.

Social marketing, Osocio says, is “the systematic application of marketing alongside other concepts and techniques to achieve specific behavioural goals for a social good.”

Social advertising, then, is “the advertising designed to educate or motivate target audiences to undertake socially desirable actions.”

What makes these viral/social initiatives different from regular initiatives? Their reliance on the social nature of the web. Social campaigns are made to be passed around from person to person. They are not static campaigns, not frozen billboard ads.

The Osocio blog’s posts consist mainly of short texts pointing to standout facets of videos, adverts or photos propagated by activists group. The scope is truly global: Recent posts highlight initiatives of The New Zealand Book Council, Instituto Nacional de Enfermedades Neoplásicas, The Aadhar Association, Associação Brasileira de imprensa, Choice FM, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Advertising Standards Bureau, the WWF and Amnesty International.

Particularly helpful is that each post identifies the advocate group and the design/advertising firm that helped create the campaign.

The dizzying amount of diversity of content captured from around the world is seemingly aided by a team of contributors based around the globe. There are 11 bloggers mentioned, all of whom each have numerous own projects and individual blogs. All specialise in some facet of social advertising/marketing.

Osocio also links to relevant news articles about viral marketing from around the world. It does so on a split page: Handpicked articles are highlighted on the left side of the page and an RSS feed from related sites stream in to the right-hand column.

In all, this is by far the most “gezellig” (to utilise a unique Dutch word) place online to learn about best practices in viral marketing.

Published: October 16, 2008