Sales training needs to be updated regularly. This is increasingly essential as the rate of technological progress increases. One of the areas which has received a lot of attention in recent years is viral marketing and in particular the use of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. These sites themselves are good examples of the speed with which new ideas are adopted and fall away. After all, only a few years ago MySpace was considered to be revolutionary. Nowadays, it is seen as something primarily for children and young adults, whereas Facebook has been far more widely adopted. Twitter has only recently started to really take a grip in the last few months. Who knows what the next big thing will be?

The whole point of these sites is to network and share things which people think will be of interest to their contacts. This makes it a very powerful way of spreading positive messages. The whole thing could be said to spread like an infectious disease hence the term ‘viral marketing’.

A number of the most common methods are podcasts, blogs and even videos and commercials. Sites such as YouTube and Wikipedia have also had a part to play.

A very popular way of achieving viral marketing is to put a video on YouTube that is either very strange or funny. The word spreads and the video is embedded in other websites. Thus the message spreads.