Guruza

Reply by vozcelik 921 days ago

It'S not actually about promotion; it is rather about "controlled" growth.

There are eight variables in maintaining the success of a viral campaign:

Sneezers
Hive
Velocity
Persistence
Vector
Medium
Smoothness
Amplification

I highly recommend you read Godin's "Spreading the Ideavirus" if you haven't alraedy.

A viral marketing campaign is no more different than a traditional marketing campaign in concept (just it costs less). You have to control product, price, promotion and place (ala 4P's of your mix)

I am pasting sevaral parts from my thesis
titled:

"The pertinence of using the viral marketing concept in social collaboration networks on the Internet as a promotion model, aiming to reach the critical mass to induce global brand awareness, for a web product or service."

(currently in draft)

Event if the first wave of the viral campaign appears to be successful, leading customer orders and sales increases, the momentum acquired by a viral marketing campaign may dwindle and eventually stagnate if not analyzed properly (Godin, 2001). This is because of the gap between the early adopters and the next segment of the revised Technology Life Cycle.

8.3. Opinion Leaders

Similarly, certain individuals influence a greater circle of people than others. These are opinion leaders whose reach can be world wide. They can be experts or people with great influence who enjoy communicating with others. Word of mouth spreading by opinion leaders will most probably increase the chance of reaching the critical mass.

8.4. E-fluentials

E-fluentials have a disproportionate reach in the Internet; spread negative experiences to people as well as positive. Their support is crucial for a brand.
Tech-fluentials are a newly discovered group of opinion leaders who are the first to try technology products. The price of the product plays a secondary role in their purchasing decision. Important are quality and functionality. Their strong presence in the Internet can create a buzz about a new technology product and their recommendations accelerate wide product adoption.

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I also higly recommend join social networks, irc groups, to spread you message.

Never forget that your initial hive (the number and quality of the early adopters) is crucial in your success.

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Continuing:

9. ELEMENTS OF A SUCCESSFUL VIRAL MARKETING CAMPAIGN

• Humor – It has got to be funny, provocative, irreverent, subversive, or deranged to get attention (O'Malley, 2006).
• Originality – It must be fresh; something the user hasn't seen before.
• Simplicity – The "pay-off" must come quickly; time is at a premium. The interface should be very simple. If the user needs some sort of a help file, or a manual before spreading the viral message he will not bother to send it anyway.
• Timeliness – A successful message should not fade out quickly.

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And beware of the negative effects:

13. NEGATIVE EFFECTS OF VIRAL MARKETING

13.1. Hate Sites
Hate-Sites on the Web should not be ignored and chat rooms should be listened to. The brand name Coca Cola and Wal-Mart (www.walmartsucks.com) had to deal with such a massive problem. Over one million Internet users clicked onto the hate site within one year (according to Alexa ratings by 2005).

13.2. Loss of Control
The concept of viral marketing is to have customers transmit a message to others. Company influence is reduced to the formulation of the message and that is only in the very beginning of a viral campaign. Once the pre-formulated promotional message, the virus, is released it cannot be controlled nor can its direction be influenced. The loss of control is compensated by the savings in advertising expenses.

13.3. Manipulation, Modification and Spamming
As it is mentioned in section 13.2., there is no control as to whom the viral message is sent. Moreover, communicators can modify the message during the process of transmission. This manipulation influences the perception of company brand identity by the receivers of the sent message. This may be harmful to the company’s brand identity.

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18. VALUE OF SOCIAL NETWORKS IN VIRAL MARKETING
An extremely important way to promote one’s website is through networking. Networking isn't quick, but it is the basis of relationships that will grow one’s business through word-of-mouth over the years.
After participating in a social network on the web for a while, you get to know the regular participants from reading their comments week after week. Regular participation enhances trust and builds reputation. Take, for example, consumer sites, such as Epinions.com, which are driven by user reviews and opinions. Even blogs are often a form of a testimonial marketing. Actually when we look from this perspective, testimonials in marketing can be thought as nothing but plain old viral marketing.
Companies want loyal customers. Jupiter found companies that take viral marketing and customer satisfaction into account when identifying loyal customers can reduce customer acquisition costs by 27 percent and increase average order sizes up to 60 percent (Mulcahy, 2003).
The overall problem was quite simple. Most companies define customer loyalty too narrowly or turn a blind eye toward customer behavior. "Most companies are not tracking their customers' behavior adequately enough to understand customer loyalty," says Jupiter analyst David Daniels (Mulcahy, 2003).
Research firm Taylor Nelson Sofres (TNS) found 98 percent of satisfied users would recommend a site to someone they know. Only 1 percent of users who are not satisfied would do the same (http://www.tnsofres.com/emailer/news_item.cfm?news_ID=100).

Most people are social. Social scientists tell that each person has a network of 8 to 12 people in their close network of friends, family, and associates (Morgan, 2006). A person's broader network may consist of hundreds, or thousands of people, depending upon her position in society.
People on the Internet develop networks of relationships, too. They collect e-mail addresses and favorite website URLs. If one places their message into existing communications between people, and they rapidly multiply the virus’ dispersion.
Another way to visualize social networks is seeing them as communities who function through their connectors and mavens and super connectors and super mavens (Godin, 2001) Super maven is someone who is dazzlingly skilled in any field.
In a social network, members are always encouraged to weave a denser and growing relationship network, both online and offline, and more members and connections equates to a more valuable network. These exponentially-growing characteristics of online social networks make them excellent tools for initiating a viral campaign.
Open social networks are the only ones that allow people to truly leverage their second degree contacts and weak ties to find that vital link (see figure 14.2).
Another important property of viral messages is that they fade out quickly if they are not amplified. As Godin (2001) says, "Ideavirus dies out. Feed it properly and you can ride it for a long time."

There cannot be a better way to feed and idea virus than spreading a viral message and distributing it over vital links. Vital links are extremely valuable, and vital nodes are generally people whom most of the networks members trust and respect. Vital nodes are powerful sneezers. And when a vital node distributes a message, its probability of being accepted by the rest of the community is quite high.
Not only efficiently using social collaboration networks increase the probability that a viral message will catch on and spread, but also it ensures that the viral message will continue to amplify itself and will not fade out given that your core idea is actually valuable to the community.
Social collaboration networks bring down the barriers by bringing (normal) people together and by providing a comfortable and non-intrusive method to get together.
Moreover, social networks enable contact management (find, re-discover, keep updated) which makes them a trusted place to manage one’s contacts. Managing contacts makes it easier for the members to spread the message.
To sum up, social networks extend our users' sphere of influence and this makes them a "must have" tool for viral marketing.

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And finally I have several figures that you may want to examine:

http://www.sarmal.com/resources/mba/thesis/viralflowchart.png

http://www.sarmal.com/resources/mba/thesis/friction.png

Reply by vozcelik 921 days ago

sorry for the scrambled formatting by the way. I think the rich text editor has gone mad (the text was perfectly redable inside the textare, with paragraphs and sections, before I submitted it. And after that it turned into a single-paragraph mess)

Never the less, imho it does not degrade the quality of it.

HTH,
Volkan