Instant Messengers in Guerrilla marketing

Instant messaging (IM) is activity where text messages are exchanged through a software application in real-time. Instant messengers usually include the ability to easily see whether a chosen friend, co-worker or "buddy" in online and connected through the selected service (TechTarget, 2009). The biggest difference to e-mail communication is the live format of conversation that is more similar to the usual phone call. However, instant messaging can be used also for file sharing, video chats or voice messaging. The most common IM services are: AOL, Windows Live, Yahoo! Messenger, Apple´s iChat, Skype or ICQ, which is the most popular IM messenger in the Czech republic.

There are 2 million active users of ICQ in the Czech Republic, according to the research published on Lidovky.cz, February 22, 2008, CZE (Pohl, 2008).

Instant Messaging has become so popular that even the biggest social network Facebook, as the research of the secondary data shows, reacted by a launch of an instant messaging service Facebook Chat right on the website. It can be expected from the usage of the instant messaging services and rapid growth of the social network websites popularity that this kind of communication will be increasing and its use will be spread among different types and forms of presence.

Guerrilla activities via instant messengers are necessarily limited by the principal difference between a media like a website where one message on a page can reach multiple visitors and an instant messaging where one message reaches always a one recipient at one time. The principle of P2P (peer-to-peer) conversation plays therefore a crucial role in designing a guerrilla campaign.

As a conclusion for using Instant Messaging with Guerrilla Marketing principles a following set of findings is designed in order to help marketers to design such guerrilla marketing campaigns that will have the desired positive impact:

• Using a friends for spreading business-related messages can have significant negative impact not only to the business related but to the sender as well.
• Sending a business-related messages to one recipient after other is time-consuming however using automated services for spamming messages in IM is unethical and cannot fulfil the guerrilla campaign purpose.
• Lot of the messengers includes a space for graphical advertising already and therefore it is even more difficult to raise an attraction of the recipient. The campaign has to be smart and clearly possible to differentiate from the usual banner advertising.
• The messaging in instant messengers is always peer-to-peer communication between persons who usually know each other personally and that are why any business-related message needs to be shaped according to the usual style used in communication with the particular person. A bulk message can be very easily recognized and immediately judged negatively.

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