 
For a good portion of the 1990's, Emanuel Rosen held the post of Vice President of Marketing at Niles Software, maker of EndNote, an Academics-related software tool designed to facilitate the management of bibliographic references.
By all accounts, Rosen, who was charged with spearheading efforts to market EndNote, conducted an exceedingly successful campaign, ultimately leading to the virtual ubiquity of EndNote at institutions of higher learning worldwide, and to sales in excess of 200,000 copies.
Despite its undisputed success, Rosen recounts being - perhaps, ironically - dissatisfied (and confounded) by one aspect of the marketing campaign for EndNote: the rapidity and extent to which the software tool propagated through the Academic world via word-of-mouth, with little marketing stimulation.
What particularly vexed Rosen, who's natural inclination it was to attempt to precisely adjust and measure every facet of the campaign, was the seemingly erratic and uncontrollable manner in which the word-of-mouth phenomenon was impacting sales of EndNote.
What began as vexation, rapidly gave way to a craving for an understanding of what might be done to systematically harness the word-of-mouth phenomenon for marketing ends. And this, in turn, led Rosen into a period of extensive research into the subject culminating with the eventual production of his seminal work, The Anatomy of Buzz, released in 2000 to highly favorable reviews from the discerning and influential likes of Al Ries, Patricia Seybold, Steve Jurvetson, Geoffrey Moore, and Seth Godin.
In Anatomy, Rosen dissects the structure of the person-to-person communication that underlies the word-of-mouth phenomenon, and attempts to extract from this structure a set of techniques that may be used to stimulate, harness, and accelerate the phenomenon, to positive marketing effect. The sum total of these techniques represents the principles of what Rosen refers to as "Buzz Marketing".
According to Rosen, Viral Marketing, the still nascent, little-understood area of Interactive Marketing is the online strand of Buzz Marketing. As such, he argues in Buzz, the principles of Buzz Marketing may be used to positively enhance the effectiveness of Viral Marketing campaigns.
In what follows, avant|marketer Editor, Ajay Segal speaks to Rosen to gets his insights into the methods, state, and future of Viral Marketing. In the course of the discussion, Rosen shares his thoughts on such matters as in which product areas and industries Viral Marketing tactics are most effectively employed, techniques whereby person-to-person Viral propagation of a marketing message can be stimulated, the correct relationship between traditional Brand Advertising and Viral Marketing, and the proper role of incentives in Viral Marketing campaigns.
avant|marketer: The concept of Viral Marketing has been subject to a number of different, sometimes disparate analyses. Steve Jurvetson, the Venture Capitalist who originally coined the term "Viral Marketing", in fact recently published a lengthy analysis of the concept himself. Distill the concept for us. What should we understand Viral Marketing to be?
Emanuel Rosen: Essentially, it's online marketing activities that stimulate person-to-person communication about a brand.
I view Viral Marketing as a subset of Buzz Marketing, in which the marketer employs both online and offline tactics to maximize positive communication among consumers.
avant|marketer: One often hears marketers and agencies suggest that Viral Marketing campaigns are, in essence, no different than campaigns designed to stimulate word-of-mouth transmission of a marketing message offline, and that, therefore, Viral Marketing campaigns and offline word-of-mouth campaigns can be implemented using essentially the same tactics. What do you think of this analysis?
Emanuel Rosen: The separation between the online and offline worlds is somewhat artificial because, ultimately, the same customers can talk online and offline. People are also motivated to talk by the same factors whether they talk face to face or on the Net. So the concepts are similar.
On the tactical level, however, there are things that are done differently on the Internet, simply because it's a different medium. Speed is an obvious difference. This opens opportunities to strategies that are not available offline.
avant|marketer: You're alluding to certain Buzz Marketing tactics that are available online but not offline. What are the biggest differences between what is possible in Buzz Marketing in the online context versus the offline context? And, is one of these two contexts the overall more powerful Buzz Marketing medium?
Emanuel Rosen: The first difference is that, online, marketers can actually facilitate the communication. The other is that in the online environment, marketers can - very economically - create rich content that people would pass along. In these respects, there's more potential in the online world.
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