Viral marketing and University Students, Uganda's most viral group

Social Graph By Martin Grandjean [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

In traditional marketing, advertisers push their message in your face, in viral marketing, they get your friends to push the message.
Let’s face it, some great products have a bit of a learning curve, and simply take more than 30 seconds to appreciate. That's why you’ll often see many ads for the same product focusing on different features. Often times, potential buyers need repeated exposure to your marketing message before committing. Sometimes, a product’s value proposition is too big to fit into a single, brief message. With traditional marketing, the more you have to say to your audience, the higher the cost will be. Some markets, are too small to justify a large advertising budget. This is where viral marketing shines. Viral marketing relies on your audience to explain your product to unconvinced members at little to no extra cost to you.

Few people in Uganda actually give much thought to viral marketing, even among the few marketers I’ve spoken to, it isn’t in the play book. There’s a tendency to erroneously equate viral marketing with social media marketing. The two are quite disparate. Viral marketing promotes products by attempting to get customers to market a product in their social networks. This is not the same as asking your friends to like your Facebook page. Viral marketing occurs offline as well. Social media marketing is simply marketing using social media.

Some marketing campaigns go viral by accident, however those that go viral intentionally (especially offline) are designed with an understanding of the structure of human social networks. Most human social networks tend towards a star topology, with most people having few connections except to a few people in the center of the social group. A message that is intended to go viral therefore should target the people at the center of these social groups. Or better yet the people at the center of several social groups. In Uganda, your average university student is as close to the perfect carrier of a viral message as you can get.

Viral Campusers

The typical university student has at least two residences. Even those with family in the same city as the university will often choose to stay in one of the university halls of residence or hostels, usually with one or more roommates. This means that any message that gets passed through to the a university student has a high chance of spreading to multiple households. What makes it even more likely the message will go far is the fact that almost all campus students will regularly visit at least one other campus student in another hall of residence or hostel and be likewise visited.
University students also tend to come from all over and unlike melting pot cities where a lot of people move permanently, University students move between the University and home fairly regularly and best of all predictably.

The university environment is far more likely to make a message go viral than just about any other environment. Universities create significantly large groups with many shared interests and similarities. This means a message can much more easily be tailored to suit the entire demographic. A message tailored for university student deals with a fairly narrow age range and literate people who are in touch with several other demographics.
Your typical university student is likely part of several social groups, from families, roommates, several sets of classmates, societies, clubs and others. What sets these students apart from other people who see lots of people a day is that students see lots of the same people fairly regularly. So conversations about any topic(say your product) can continue beyond the first time its brought up.

They are trend setters, if your product is new, they are the type most likely to talk about the fancy new thing they have. This is of course ideal for viral marketing.

So if you want a cheaper way to market your product to households in a place like Uganda. Consider viral marketing with university students as your initial target, they tend to live in fairly dense and student exclusive places which make targeting them even easier. Once your message takes root, just wait and see them spread it for you. You just have to convince them first.