Viral Marketing : Viral Mechanisms and Seeding Strategies presentation I gave at Blueglass Florida 2010. Discussed the importance of baking in mechanisms into your content to help it spread and the power of a big seed strategy.
2. What is Viral Marketing?
When your audience markets for you.
3. Not All Viral Campaigns Turn Into Viruses
• Viral marketing doesn’t have to be 400,000 visits in
3 days
• 30,000 visits over 12 months spread across multiple
campaigns and launches that in turn creates success
over time.
6. The Real Truth Of Viral Marketing Components
Content
Mechanisms
Seed
7. Types Of Viral Mechanisms
• Forwarding to a friend
• Links in widgets
• “Free” – Give it all away for a short time.
• Affiliate Programs
• FB Likes
• Twitter Retweets
• Automatic Address book importing
• Competitions With Leaderboards
• Login With Facebook
14. Viral Seeding Techniques
Initial Seeding By Marketers
• Press Release
• Blogger and Community Outreach
• PPC
– Facebook engagement ads
– Sponsored Tweets
– Google Adwords, Bing Adcenter
• Banner Media Buys
• Emails and status updates
• Word of Mouth
• Frontpaging Digg, Frontpaging Reddit, Tumblr Reblogs
2nd Level Seeding Done By The Audience
• Emailing a list
• Personal and Family relationships
• Twitter Status update
• Facebook Status update
• Blog post
16. Factors For Success
• Viruses only spread when they are easy to
transmit
• Ensure inviting users is core to the product, app
or website
• Remind users to keep coming back
• Use existing networks instead of creating new
ones
• Apply low barrier to entry’s early on in the funnel
• Develop a Formula and stick with it
17. Successful Viral Marketing Environment
Success!
Make Content Travel Far With Seeding Techniques
Multiple Seeds
Make Content Travel On Its Own With Baked in Viral Mechanisms
Content Viral Mechanisms
18. Further Reading
• One of the original primers on Viral marketing from 2000.
http://bit.ly/dr-wilson-viral
• Read more about the viral loop here
http://bit.ly/viral-loop
• Crowd Sourced Viral Loop examples
http://productplanner.com/
• How To Make Your Application Viral
http://bit.ly/app-viral
-seeding is when you take your content and plant in the wild for users to find, consume and share and when your audience reciprocates
-A mechanism could be one of two things
-something to facilitate easy sharing of your content (example = a fb like button)
-something that would cause you to be enticed to share (example = affiliate marketing b/c they have a reason to share to make money)
-mention content will not be talked about and the seeding and mechanisms are important and what I am talking about.
-Award users for Forwarding to a friend
Add slide before this with pre example
Add slide before this with pre example
trying to artificially recreate a virus
“most effective way to go viral in a big way is to do it in many small ways – a “big seed” strategy where you push your content out to a lot of different places to raise your chances of several unrelated people passing it on.”
Duncan Watts – Yahoo Labs Principal Research Scientist
Email, website, application, graphic, software download.
Short and simple applies better no where else. (Hotmail – “Get your private, free email at http://hotmail.com”
Mint.com does this well when it sends an email out reminding users to login since its been a long time.
Apply low barrier to entry’s early on in the funnel before asking to share, that way the user feels more obligated since they already took an action.