Articles

Viral Marketing for the Real World

Columbia School of Business | Academic paper | 08 Jul 2008

By Duncan J. Watts, Jonah Peretti, and Michael Frumin

Academic paper by Professors Watts, Peratti, and Frumin dated 2007

Defines the viral coefficient which determines how likely your promotion is to spread like wildfire and boils it down into a single number, where anything over 1 indicates that you have a true viral marketing campaign on your hands, and anything less than 1 indicates that your campaign may have momentum but is less than viral.  Details why in the real world marketers should not plan on seeing their promotions go viral - that viral marketing is more a happy accident of fate versus a result of careful strategic thinking and well-planned execution.  As an alternative to luck, the authors propose something they call “Big Seed” marketing ... in other words investing in a little seeding to make your promotion based on widgets or social applications successful.  Included is a formula that can be used to determine exactly how much seeding is required to obtain any particular reach goal. 

Here’s what one blogger had to say about the article:

“The article is a good introduction to viral marketing, particularly for marketers that aren’t aware they can exploit these principles to improve their marketing ROI. Watts highlights the amplification effect of even minor virality on boosting the effectiveness of a marketing spend. It focuses on a “big seed marketing” approach, implying that this principle should be leveraged by big budget marketers. However, the article fails to point out that this principle can be leveraged by all marketers, regardless of their budget size. For example, if you have a viral coefficient of .7, each person you acquire through advertising actually results in 3.5 new people. This amplification effect can dramatically improve the ROI of targeted direct response marketing or broad reaching brand advertising.

The other key point he misses is that marketers can actually “tune” their virality to improve their viral coefficient. Each viral element becomes additive enhancing your overall viral coefficient, so a natural first step is to add more viral elements. Additionally variations of each viral element can be A/B tested to optimize their virality. While the ideal goal is to reach the magic 1.0 tipping point, each improvement enhances the ROI of all future marketing investments. This concept is particularly powerful for new web startups as part of an overall go-to-market approach.” --Sean Ellis, Blogger and VP of Marketing for Xobni

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Viral Marketing in the Real World