Diploma thesis deals with dynamically developing medium -- Internet and focuses on its marketing usage. At first the thesis describes development of the Internet worldwide, in Czech republic and analyzes czech Internet users. Then follows description advantages and disadvantages of the Internet as a marketing tool and media analyses. The thesis also describes various kinds of Internet marketing tools as viral marketing, buzz marketing, social networks and others. In section buzz marketing is focus on insight into real work in media communication agency . The gained information are used as a theoretical background in practical part where is carried out secondary and primary research regarding impact and characteristics of viral videos. The final outcome is summary of key findings and set of recommendations for designing successful viral video based on previous analyses.

The diploma thesis introduces Guerilla marketing as an unconventional method of commercial communication. The basics of traditional marketing are described in the first part of the work. Afterwards, the types of Guerilla marketing are presented whereas their advantages and possibilities are identified using practical examples. The consumers attitude toward the unconventional commercial communication is analyzed with the help of executed survey.

Background: With the emergence of new social platforms, nascent strategies of Viral Marketing utilizing User-generated Content has developed. TikTok is a new social media based on User-generated videos, where content is mainly expressed in the form of #challenges. Given its nascent nature, marketers lack clear directives of how to capitalize on #challenges by engaging the user base, in their pursuit of reaching virality. As the underlying motivations behind the participation of #challenges are unknown, further research is required. Purpose: The purpose of this study is therefore to explore what motivates Gen Z users to participate in #challenges on TikTok and how companies can utilize these motivations to structure their own #challenges’ in marketing campaigns.   Method: This is an exploratory qualitative study inspired by grounded theory where sixteen semi-structured, in-depth interviews were held with participants classified as Gen Z. Qualitative content analysis was used to develop a revised model of Uses and Gratification Theory.   Conclusion: The results suggests that the Uses and Gratification theory could be used in explaining the underlying motivation for participating in #challenges on TikTok. By drawing connections between Uses and Gratification Theory and empirical data, a revised model was found to include the six traditional forms of motivations with structure as an added seventh prevalent motivation on TikTok. The results propose the motivators factors to participate in a challenge to be intertwined but suggest Entertainment to be a superseding motivator. Suggestions of elements that marketers could implement in their campaigns were thereafter derived.

Yes / This study was conducted to conceptualise advertising value and consumer attitudes towards advertisements. The research was developed to reveal the effect of the source of advertisements on credibility perception through the theoretical framework of Ducoffe's (1995) advertising value model. The research objective is to identify source derogation in terms of credibility to create advertising value and a positive attitude towards advertisements launched through the Facebook social network. In this regard, the study used three distinct sources to generate and introduce product promotional messages: an associative reference group, an aspirational reference group and marketers themselves. This research revealed significant differences in developing advertisement value and forming a favourable attitude towards advertisements when the product-related message was developed by these three distinct groups, who have different source derogations.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-29T13:31:10Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Gabriel Monteiro da Fonseca Leal Maia.pdf: 598823 bytes, checksum: 35700c02e6514ebcf21024b2cc2f933a (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-03-28 / Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico / The present work had as its main purpose to investigate, under the lacanian psychoanalytic notion of discourse as a form for enjoyment implementation on social bonds, the way in which the modality referred to as "viral marketing" largely employed in the Internet fuses with the technical properties of networked digital media, and its use by the subjects under contemporary capitalist historical context, to yield its diffusing objectives. For such a task, we have first conducted a bibliographical survey, divided into three chapters, and then made an analysis of viral marketing under contemporary social bonds (backed by two cases considered to be successful by professionals in the area). Regarding the researched bibliography, we first establish the relations between capitalism and discourses, sustained by views drawn from Jacques Lacan and other authors in Psychoanalysis. We then focus on the historic developments of strategies for stimulating consumption, especially held by advertising and marketing companies, and their merging with the technical developments of 20th century media and the advent of viral marketing. Later, we investigate the transformations held inside the capitalist mode of production and the abstraction of commodities in brands, examining how these transformations relate to contemporary media system and its use by the subjects. Finally, we place viral marketing under the social bond of the Discourse of the Master, where the market induces the know-how of social network users to spread media content amongst its social circles, propagating both image and brand s name (the virus) / O presente trabalho teve como objetivo principal investigar, a partir da noção psicanalítica lacaniana de discurso como meio de aparelhamento do gozo no laço social, o modo com que a modalidade denominada marketing viral realizada fundamentalmente pela Internet aliase, para colocar em prática seus objetivos, às propriedades técnicas dos meios de comunicação digitais conectados em rede e ao seu uso pelos sujeitos no contexto histórico do capitalismo atual. Para tanto, foram realizados um levantamento bibliográfico dividido em três capítulos e, posteriormente, uma análise do marketing viral no laço social contemporâneo (valendo-se de dois casos considerados bem-sucedidos por profissionais da área). Em relação à bibliografia pesquisada, primeiramente foram estabelecidas as relações entre o capitalismo e os discursos, valendo-se tanto das pontuações de Jacques Lacan quanto de articulações desenvolvidas por outros autores da área da psicanálise. Em seguida, dissertamos sobre o percurso histórico das estratégias de incitação ao consumo presentes na publicidade e no marketing e seu entrelaçamento com o desenvolvimento técnico dos meios de comunicação do século XX até o recente advento do marketing viral. Adiante, tratamos das transformações no modo de produção capitalista e da abstração da mercadoria em marca publicitária, discutindo o modo com que essas mudanças se relacionam com o sistema dos meios de comunicação contemporâneos e seu respectivo uso pelos sujeitos. Por fim, situamos o marketing viral fundamentalmente no laço social do Discurso do Mestre, onde o mercado ordena ao saberfazer dos sujeitos usuários das redes sociais da Internet que replique um determinado conteúdo midiático ao seu círculo de contatos, de modo a produzir a circulação da imagem e do nome da marca (o vírus)

Social phenomena have been studied extensively in small scales by social scientists. With the increasing popularity of Web 2.0 and online social networks/media, a large amount of data on social phenomena have become available. In this dissertation we study online social phenomena such as social influence in social networks in various contexts. This dissertation has two major components: 1. Identifying and characterizing online social phenomena 2. Leveraging online social phenomena for economic and commercial purposes. We begin the dissertation by developing multi-level revenue sharing schemes for viral marketing on social networks. Viral marketing leverages social influence among users of the social network. For our proposed models, we develop results on the computational complexity, individual rationality, and potential reach of employing the Shapley value as a revenue sharing scheme. Our results indicate that under the multi-level tree-based propagation model, the Shapley value is a promising scheme for revenue sharing, whereas under other models there are computational or incentive compatibility issues that remain open. We continue with another application of social influence: social advertising. Social advertising is a new paradigm that is utilized by online social networks. Social advertising is based in the premise that social influence can be leveraged to place ads more efficiently. The goal of our work is to understand how social ads can affect click-through rates in social networks. We propose a formal model for social ads in the context of display advertising. In our model, ads are shown to users one after the other. The probability of a user clicking an ad depends on the users who have clicked this ad so far. This information is presented to users as a social cue, thus the click probability is a function of this cue. We introduce the social display optimization problem: suppose an advertiser has a contract with a publisher for showing some number (say B) impressions of an ad. What strategy should the publisher use to show these ads so as to maximize the expected number of clicks? We show hardness results for this problem and in light of the general hardness results, we develop heuristic algorithms and compare them to natural baseline ones. We then study distributed content curation on the Web. In recent years readers have turned to the social web to consume content. In other words, they rely on their social network to curate content for them as opposed to the more traditional way of relying on news editors for this purpose -- this is an implicit consequence of social influence as well. We study how efficient this is for users with limited budgets of attention. We model distributed content curation as a reader-publisher game and show various results. Our results imply that in the complete information setting, when publishers maximize their utility selfishly, distributed content curation reaches an equilibrium which is efficient, that is, the social welfare is a constant factor of that under an optimal centralized curation. Next, we initiate the study of an exchange market problem without money that is a natural generalization of the well-studied kidney exchange problem. From the practical point of view, the problem is motivated by barter websites on the Internet, e.g., swap.com, and u-exchange.com. In this problem, the users of the social network wish to exchange items with each other. A mechanism specifies for each user a set of items that she gives away, and a set of items that she receives. Consider a set of agents where each agent has some items to offer, and wishes to receive some items from other agents. Each agent would like to receive as many items as possible from the items that she wishes, that is, her utility is equal to the number of items that she receives and wishes. However, she will have a large dis-utility if she gives away more items than what she receives, because she considers such a trade to be unfair. To ensure voluntary participation (also known as individual rationality), we require the mechanism to avoid this. We consider different variants of this problem: with and without a constraint on the length of the exchange cycles and show different results including their truthfulness and individual rationality. In the other main component of this thesis, we study and characterize two other social phenomena: 1. friends vs. the crowd and 2. altruism vs. reciprocity in social networks. More specifically, we study how a social network user's actions are influenced by her friends vs. the crowd's opinion. For example, in social rating websites where both ratings from friends and average ratings from everyone is available, we study how similar one's ratings are to each other. In the next part, we aim to analyze the motivations behind users' actions on online social media over an extended period of time. We look specifically at users' likes, comments and favorite markings on their friends' posts and photos. Most theories of why people exhibit prosocial behavior isolate two distinct motivations: Altruism and reciprocity. In our work, we focus on identifying the underlying motivations behind users' prosocial giving on social media. In particular, our goal is to identify if the motivation is altruism or reciprocity. For that purpose, we study two datasets of sequence of users' actions on social media: a dataset of wall posts by users of Facebook.com, and another dataset of favorite markings by users of Flickr.com. We study the sequence of users' actions in these datasets and provide several observations on patterns related to their prosocial giving behavior.

<p>Bakgrund: I massmedia har det på senare tid börjat uppmärksammas ett nytt fenomen inom internetbaserad marknadsföring som kallas för viral marknadsföring. Det har dock inte gjorts några studier om vad begreppet egentligen innebär. </p><p>Syfte: Att ge en innebörd åt begreppet viral marknadsföring och att undersöka de faktorer som kan påverka möjligheten att kunna utnyttja viral marknadsföring. </p><p>Avgränsningar: I denna studie har vi avgränsat oss genom att säga att teorierna kring viral marknadsföring endast går att applicera på Internet. I studien behandlas endast konsumentrelaterade produkter. Genomförande: Undersökningen har genomförts via studier av artiklar och litteratur och med en empirisk del som består av enkätundersökning, intervju samt data från ett fallföretag. </p><p>Resultat: Viral marknadsföring handlar om att låta utomstående personer marknadsföra det egna företaget via Internet. Spridning av viral marknadsföring kan ske aktivt eller passivt. I uppsatsen identifieras olika typer av viral marknadsföring beroende på vilken typ av produkt eller tjänst som marknadsförs. Avslutningsvis redovisas en modell som beskriver de faktorer som bör beaktas vid utformandet av en viral marknadsföringsstrategi, detta med avseende på produkten, kunden och marknaden.</p>

<p>Purpose/Aim: The purpose of this study was to investigate future marketing channels from the perspective of professional marketers.</p><p>Material/Method: The study is based upon interviews with six professional marketers.</p><p>Main results: Traditional marketing is not being put aside but needs to be combined with new methods. There are several new and exciting ways to gain attention from the audience, all depending on the purpose of the campaign. Mobile technology is considered upcoming and target group defining is a key issue.</p>

Bakgrund: I massmedia har det på senare tid börjat uppmärksammas ett nytt fenomen inom internetbaserad marknadsföring som kallas för viral marknadsföring. Det har dock inte gjorts några studier om vad begreppet egentligen innebär. Syfte: Att ge en innebörd åt begreppet viral marknadsföring och att undersöka de faktorer som kan påverka möjligheten att kunna utnyttja viral marknadsföring. Avgränsningar: I denna studie har vi avgränsat oss genom att säga att teorierna kring viral marknadsföring endast går att applicera på Internet. I studien behandlas endast konsumentrelaterade produkter. Genomförande: Undersökningen har genomförts via studier av artiklar och litteratur och med en empirisk del som består av enkätundersökning, intervju samt data från ett fallföretag. Resultat: Viral marknadsföring handlar om att låta utomstående personer marknadsföra det egna företaget via Internet. Spridning av viral marknadsföring kan ske aktivt eller passivt. I uppsatsen identifieras olika typer av viral marknadsföring beroende på vilken typ av produkt eller tjänst som marknadsförs. Avslutningsvis redovisas en modell som beskriver de faktorer som bör beaktas vid utformandet av en viral marknadsföringsstrategi, detta med avseende på produkten, kunden och marknaden.

The purpose of this thesis is to clarify the connection between word-of-mouth and viral marketing, to identify properties of and strategic ways to implement viral marketing and to examine how a company can influence the customers’ perception of the brand in social media. This purpose served to answer our research question:  How can companies deliberately create viral marketing? To answer this question we based our study on a qualitative method where we conducted eight interviews with different people, all with experience in our research field. We focused on our respondents’ own opinions and were more interested in their personal experiences rather than the market in general. In our last chapter our analysis clearly demonstrates that companies can deliberately create viral marketing. This is possible if companies create material that appeal to and that triggers the costumer to share. Furthermore, the company must then respect the customer's power regarding the material and dare to let the customer take control. More specifically, we have also been able to identify aspects of viral marketing and examine how companies can manage viral marketing in a strategic manner. / Syfte: Uppsatsen har tre delsyften som tillsammans bidragit till att finna ett svar på forskningsfrågan som lyder: Hur kan ett företag medvetet skapa viral marknadsföring? För att kunna besvara vår forskningsfråga så har vi först besvarat tre delsyften. Vi har klargjort kopplingen mellan word-of-mouth och viral marknadsföring, vidare har vi identifierat egenskaper hos viral marknadsföring samt ett strategiskt tillvägagångssätt för viral marknadsföring. Slutligen har vi även utrett hur ett företag kan influera kundens varumärkesimage genom att kontrollera sin varumärkesidentitet via sociala medier. Metod: Vi har i och med den här uppsatsen valt att arbeta med en kvalitativ forskningsmetod. Vår ansats har varit induktiv med deduktiva inslag, det vill säga abduktiv. Den empiriska materialinsamlingen har bestått av åtta kvalitativa intervjuer som genom deras personliga natur gett oss en djupare förståelse för ämnet som studerats. Slutsats: Vi har genom vår analys kunnat påvisa att företag medvetet kan skapa viral marknadsföring. Detta genom att skapa material som tilltalar och triggar kunden att dela. Vidare måste företaget sedan respektera kundens omnipotenta makt över materialet och våga lämna över kontrollen. Mer specifikt har vi också kunnat identifiera aspekter hos viral marknadsföring samt utrett hur företag kan hantera viral marknadsföring på ett strategiskt sätt.