After its foray into viral marketing through virtual networking website Second Life, Bangalore-based Wipro has hooked on to Youtube to market its services.

The company feels it can upload videos on the video-sharing site and use it as a primer to information put up on its own website.

Viral marketing, essentially, uses social networks to create and spread brand awareness.

The first video called, Penguins and SOA story, was put up on Youtube on December 23 and had received about 923 page views till Friday. The animated clip uses penguins and their problem of constructing a housing structure to illustrate the benefits of the service-oriented architecture (SOA) technology. Viewers interested in getting more information about Wipro’s offerings in this space are provided a link to the company website.

“The animated video is a way to get attention to a topic or service. It basically communicates that the company has some good stuff in this area, why don’t you (interested viewer/client) come to my website and let’s proceed further,’’ Jessie Paul, chief marketing officer, Wipro Technologies told Financial Chronicle.

Wipro is using viral marketing as a new way to reach out to existing and prospective customers. Paul says that the target audience for these videos are people in the senior manager and VP levels who work for chief information officers of companies.

Paul added that the uploaded Penguin clip had seen some success with an over 3 per

cent conversion rate of the video’s viewers reaching out to the company’s web site.

Wipro is now working on a second film on SOA to be uploaded in January 2009. Other future videos planned are on green IT and unified communications segments.

The IT major earlier this year had put up a couple of corporate videos but has recently paid to have an official channel on Youtube to upload these videos.

The making of the videos have been outsourced to a design firm in Bangalore called Pepper Square.

The budget for a single video would be a little less than Rs 1 lakh. Paul said spending more would not make sense since the video clips on networking sites had a small shelf-life of about one to three months.

Methods such as viral marketing, white papers and video presentations, which define thought leadership in technology, are expected to increase in usage as Indian information technology firms try and cut costs on travel and sales & marketing budgets.

Experts say that a significant part of the travel spend (about 50 per cent of overall sales & marketing budget) will now

be moved to thought leadership as a way to build business.