Viral marketing is a marketing tool that is becoming more common in the marketing industry. As people spend more time on the internet via their smartphones, tablets and computers marketers try to find new ways to reach out and connect with consumers. Succeeding with a viral spread is not easy; it's several factors that are important. Viral marketing encourages consumers to recommend and talk about product-related information with each other. So, what should a viral campaign or message contain in order to create this interest among us consumers? There are few empirical studies done in this subject which makes this kind of uncharted territory. By reading previous studies done in the subject we managed to find a few factors that reappeared frequently. In our theory chapter, we describe what previous studies say about these viral marketing factors; Message, Messenger, Social Media and Environment. Based on the theory we then created questions which we used when we interviewed 10 respondents who work with viral marketing on a daily basis. All answers were then stacked up in a table in which we extracted interesting patterns. These patterns are discussed and analyzed in our analysis chapter where our data is compared with previously done theory and our own reflections.

Our contribution by this thesis is to bring empirical data within viral marketing, which has been missing up to now. We have done this through interviews and a model that we have developed. Keywords: Viral marketing, Social media, Social media marketing, Viral message