While you can’t create a viral marketing campaign – i.e. you won’t know, at the outset, whether your article, video, game or other content will actually go viral – you CAN seed your content in certain places to maximize the chances of it going viral.

To that end – and assuming your content is relevant to the audience you’re targeting (otherwise they’re unlikely to spread it!) – here are five places to seed your potentially viral campaign:

Nike is the most viral brand, according to the Viral Ad Network’s ranking of brands with the most viral videos on Facebook and Twitter.

Nike was the most shared brand on both Facebook (324,121 shares) and Twitter (35,280), basically due to having the most shared video – Nike’s ‘Write The Future’ – on both social media sites.

No Internet marketer can create a viral marketing campaign. By definition, you can’t design a marketing campaign to ‘go viral’ since, like a real-life virus, true virility is out of your hands. It depends on the extent to which there are ‘hosts’ spreading your message.

As in real life, however, you can create the conditions likely to maximize the spread of a marketing virus. Here are 5 tips for doing so:

Hollywood movie studios’ latest marketing initiative is to use social media games to promote their movies. Hoping such games will ‘go viral’ among film-goers, studios such as Sony Pictures are planning such games as early in the development of a movie as the script writing stage.

Unlike retail games based on movies, these social media games are designed to be free and relatively short-lived, as part of the marketing campaign for the release of a given movie.

According to Visible Measures, the top 10 viral videos of 2009 were all music videos, except for the No. 1 viral video – a trailer for the movie Twilight Saga: New Moon.

Based on tracking viewership of both officially syndicated video clips and viewer-driven social video placements, Visible Measures’ data is based on analysing 200 million Internet videos displayed on 150 video-sharing platforms including YouTube, MySpace, MTV, Viacom and others.

Dan Zarrella, HubSpot social media expert and author of The Social Media Marketing Book is hosting a free one hour webinar on how to use social media and viral marketing to get people talking about your business online. The webinar will take place on Wednesday, December 9, 2009 at 2pm (U.S. EST). Go here to register.

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Yesterday, we discussed the results of Silverpop’s ‘Emails Gone Viral: Measuring Share to Social Performance’ study, which showed the potential of including links that enable readers to share your email content on social networks.

With the benefits of greater exposure – and ultimately traffic, conversions and sales – at stake, how should you implement social network sharing links in your emails?

A powerful way to generate an online viral marketing effect – hopefully with increased exposure, traffic, conversions and sales as a result – is to encourage email readers to share your email content with others on social networks.

To see how email marketers are currently encouraging ‘shares’ on social networks, consider the seven (7) key findings of Silverpop’s ‘Emails Gone Viral: Measuring Share to Social Performance’ benchmark study.

Viral marketing – cheap, easy and massively effective. You create something once, and then, with little effort or expense on your part, word about your article, game, movie, product or website (or whatever it is) disseminates across the Internet like wildfire. Traffic pours into your website and sales abound.

Yeah, right.

The harsh reality is that, for most Internet marketers who put concerted effort into creating viral marketing campaigns, not only is a considerable amount of work (and sometimes lots of money) involved, but most viral marketing campaigns fall flat on their face.

Viral marketing is surely the ultimate form of marketing: you create something once, and then, with no effort on your part, word about your article, game, movie, product or website (or whatever it is) gets spread to others, who spread it to others, who in turn spread it to more people, and the result is non-stop, ever-growing traffic and sales.

Sounds like a dream… and, unfortunately, for most Internet marketers who create viral marketing campaigns, such results are only the stuff of dreams. The reality  is that (a) Internet marketers engaged in viral marketing have to put a considerable amount of work – and sometimes lots of money – into developing viral campaigns and (b) most viral marketing campaigns don’t become viral at all.