6 Essenstials of Viral Marketing

6 Viral Seeding Must-Have Methods


You’ve cre­ated the most awe­some and incred­i­bly infec­tious piece of viral cre­ative in the his­tory of man, or at least you’d like to think so. But now what? Viral mar­ket­ing that nobody sees is hardly viral, so how do you “seed” your viral mes­sage, where should you post your con­tent, who should you send it to, how do you get it to “go viral?”

Here are 6 cri­te­ria that viral seed­ing meth­ods must pos­sess to be worth­while to social mar­keters. Depend­ing on the con­tent and its goals, the impor­tant of each of these cri­te­ria may vary, but they are present in some form in all great seed­ing plat­forms. After the list of cri­te­ria I also ana­lyze the best and most com­mon online viral seed­ing plat­forms and how they address my cri­te­ria.


Here are the criteria:
1. High Copy­ing Fidelity

Richard Dawkins (the father of memet­ics) says that memes must con­tain 3 traits to be suc­cess­ful and one of them is “copy­ing fidelity.” The idea must be capa­ble of copy­ing itself with a high degree of accu­racy, oth­er­wise it will soon become unrec­og­niz­able. A good seed­ing mech­a­nism will allow for this and pro­vide a way for users to copy and spread the viral cre­ative in or close to its orig­i­nal form. Tra­di­tional offline word of mouth tends to have lower copy­ing fidelity than online, because of the lack of copy-and-paste func­tion­al­ity, but even among dig­i­tal com­mu­ni­ca­tions meth­ods, some pro­vide greater accu­racy in repro­duc­tion than oth­ers. For instance, SMS gen­er­ally requires that a per­son retype the mes­sage before send­ing it to a new friends, whereas email has for­ward but­ton that sends ver­ba­tim copies.
2. Increased Reach

Another of the 3 cri­te­ria for suc­cess­ful memetic spread cited by Dawkins is “fecun­dity”. That is, the faster a meme repro­duces, the more suc­cess­ful it will be. For seed­ing this means that a worth­while medium will expose as large an audi­ence as pos­si­ble to the viral mes­sage. My research showed that one of the biggest moti­va­tions behind respon­dents deci­sion to share a piece of con­tent in a broad­cast fash­ion was the increased reach the plat­form allowed them.

3. Pro­lific Audience

Beyond sim­ply reach­ing as wide an audi­ence as pos­si­ble, the best viral seed­ing meth­ods will expose as pro­lific an audi­ence as pos­si­ble to the mes­sage. My research has shown that savvy social media users tend to share con­tent more often and with more peo­ple than nor­mal web users, mean­ing that social media sites attract a very pro­lific audi­ence that can spread your mes­sage fur­ther than the aver­age audience.

4. Per­ma­nence

The third cri­te­ria men­tioned by Dawkins is longevity, a meme will be more suc­cess­ful the longer each copy of it sur­vives. A good seed­ing plat­form will pro­vide for some level of per­ma­nence, so that users can refer back to the source of the mes­sage in the future.

5. Trust

Indi­vid­u­als are exposed to count­less organic memes and inten­tion­ally viral mes­sages every day and the web has accel­er­ated this trend. For a per­son to be attracted by a piece of con­tent and decide to spend some of their time in fur­ther­ing it, they must trust the source to some degree. Fran­cis Hey­lighen men­tioned author­ity as a memetic selec­tion cri­te­ria in his 1998 work on the sub­ject. Depend­ing on the type of con­tent, the level of trust required varies, for purely entertainment-based con­tent, the trust thresh­old is low, it is higher for instruc­tional con­tent and still high­est for news-type con­tent. In social com­mu­ni­ca­tions, typ­i­cally trust comes from author­ity (a well known news source) or social proof, obvi­ous signs that many of a person’s peers also trust the mes­sage. Com­mon exam­ples of social proof are the huge email-forward-chains that con­tain hun­dreds of email addresses, and the hun­dreds or thou­sands of votes a piece of con­tent will receive on a social vot­ing site.
6. Con­ver­sa­tion

One of the moti­va­tions most oft-cited by respon­dents to my sur­vey was the desire of the sharer to start a con­ver­sa­tion or receive feed­back about a piece of con­tent. Com­mu­nal recre­ation is a reoc­cur­ring theme in social and con­ta­gious com­mu­ni­ca­tions, includ­ing gos­sip, slang, rumors, oral tra­di­tion, and urban leg­ends. The best viral seed­ing plat­forms will allow for view­ers to com­ment on the con­tent, adding their own take on it, and fur­ther­ing the process of com­mu­nal recre­ation.

Based on the above cri­te­ria, here’s a list of the best viral seed­ing mediums:
Social News Vot­ing Sites

Sites like Digg, Red­dit, Sphinn, etc, are great places (per­haps the best) to seed viral con­tent because they cen­ter around links to the actual con­tent, allow­ing peo­ple to spread exact copies of the orig­i­nal mes­sage, they tend to have not only huge audi­ences, but extremely savvy and pro­lific social audi­ences, links on social news sites not only remain vis­i­ble indef­i­nitely, but they also allow social proof to build in the form of votes and users can com­ment on indi­vid­ual sto­ries (often these com­ments them­selves can be voted on as well).
Blogs and Blog­ger Outreach

Blogs are prob­a­bly the most obvi­ous exam­ple of a viral medium that addresses the above cri­te­ria: high-copying fidelity, per­ma­nence, con­ver­sa­tion, large and savvy audi­ences. For the mar­keter who wants to seed his con­tent, the com­pany blog may seem like an obvi­ous, if all together too-easy way to do it, and truth be told, unless your com­pany is very well known, its not going to do much good. The trick then becomes to get blog­gers with large (and pro­lific) audi­ences to men­tion your cre­ative. So make a list of blog­gers pop­u­lar (and trusted) among the savvi­est of your tar­get demo­graphic and build rela­tion­ships with them and ask if they’re open to spread­ing your content.
Microblog­ging Sites

Microblog­ging sys­tems like Twit­ter and Plurk are newer than vot­ing sites, but the have their own advan­tages for seed­ing viral con­tent. Per­ma­nent links, large and savvy audi­ences, ver­ba­tim copy­ing in the form of “retweet­ing”, social proof in the form of fol­lower totals and of course, plenty of con­ver­sa­tion and com­mu­nal recre­ation. Seed­ing con­tent on a site like Twit­ter can func­tion much like viral blog pro­mo­tion, develop your own high-reach pro­file and/or reach out to per­son­al­i­ties with built-in audiences.

Social Net­work­ing Sites

While my research shows that Face­book is not an extremely pop­u­lar source for virally shared con­tent, mar­keters would be remiss to dis­re­gard its poten­tial as a seed­ing mech­a­nism. Most of the above men­tioned cri­te­ria are present, par­tic­u­larly with Face­book groups and pages. The gen­eral social net­work audi­ence is not as savvy and pro­lific as the Digg or Twit­ter audi­ence, but the poten­tial audi­ence is much big­ger on a site like Facebook.

Social Media Sites

Sites like Youtube present an inter­est­ing inter­me­di­ary seed­ing plat­form, in that a video can be posted to the site and then the Youtube link can be pro­moted through the above-mentioned seed­ing mech­a­nisms. At its core how­ever, Youtube itself is a great plat­form that address the cri­te­ria I men­tioned, increas­ing a videos audi­ence on a site like Youtube gen­er­ally requires get­ting it into fea­tured or most-popular lists, a process which can be accom­plished in a wide range of ways.

Email

Email, of course, is the orig­i­nal online viral medium and for many audi­ences and mes­sages still the most pow­er­ful. What it lacks in a pro­lific audi­ence it more than makes up for in sheer poten­tial audi­ence size, as nearly every­one who uses the web uses email. The for­ward but­ton ensures copy­ing fidelity and for­ward head­ers pro­mote social proof. When a very main­stream audi­ence is desired, (as in elec­tions for exam­ple) email is often the best viral medium, with blogs and social net­work­ing sites com­ing in a close second.