Social Networks and Viral Marketing: Repercussion and Incidence in the Construction of the Media Agenda

Abstract

In this paper is demonstrated how the establishment of consolidated relationships in the virtual social contexts and the development of linked practices related to the viral marketing can alter the traditional process of informative production. The media agenda had always been built with the share of the media and their sources, but currently many users’ active involvement on the internet has repercussions in the creation of contents that themselves create and they spread via viral techniques. These contents are not journalistic information in many cases, but when they reach repercussion, they finish being news and accessing to the agenda media, so that the users are who promote contents that media publish. This phenomenon is materialized in the federal elections in Mexico in 2007, where the political and citizen involvements in the new virtual scenarios finish for modifying the agenda of traditional media and, even, for changing the political reality of the country.