Viral marketing is perhaps the most powerful global marketing tool today - a veritable Web 2.0 weapon…

A bold statement, and seemingly over-simplistic, yet in this day and age is it unrealistic?

Take this example.

One post on a blog in Sydney, Australia can spark a reaction which spreads to hundreds of websites all over Asia within hours. That’s all of China and India already - almost 2.5 billion people.

That blog post can in turn, be replicated, with no more than a swift CTRL-C CTRL-V flip of the keys, to thousands more. And within 24 hours, something - be it a photo, or a statement, or a quote - can be in front of the eyes of hundreds of millions of users.

Several hours later, as Europe awakes, and comes online, that post has spread to a handful of European sites. Hours later, bloggers in Germany, France, and Italy have harvested and acknowledged that information, and on, and on, across the Atlantic, to another billion or so people…

Sometime in 2005, we quietly passed a major milestone - the billionth web user went online. Statistically, that person would likely be a 24-year old woman in Shanghai. It took 35 years for the first 1,000,000,000 users to come online. The second billion will likely be somewhere between now and 2015, all rational arguments considered.

Morgan Stanley estimates that 36% of web users are in Asia (surprisingly China has nearly five times as many users as India). 24% of users are in Europe and 23% are in North America (in 1995, North America had 66% of users).

So, put simply, when a blog post is picked up in the Viral Marketing maelstrom of the web, the ripples move outwards, and spread their influence. This is the new internet. This is Web 2.0: user-generated and user-moderated content.

The proverbial butterfly flaps its wings, as James Gleick might say…