Mobile viral marketing has a tremendous potential for communication and distribution purposes. Although seen as an important issue from the viewpoint of practitioners there has been little research on the phenomenon so far. This paper represents a first step in filling this void. We examine 34 case studies in order to identify relevant characteristics of mobile viral marketing. The outcome of the paper is a description model of mobile viral marketing as well as a derivation of four mobile viral marketing standard types. The proposed scheme allows unambiguously
characterizing any given mobile viral marketing strategy and providing recommendations for designing new mobile viral strategies.