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The purpose of this white paper is to define the best practices in viral marketing to help marketers extend their marketing arsenal by incorporating viral marketing within their organization.
The focus of this white paper is not on brick and mortar viral marketing programs, which are necessary, but rather on the ingredients required for formalizing and automating the online viral marketing process, and particularly, in corporate web sites, and not necessarily, in public destination web sites like portals, classifieds, auctions, job boards, etc.
We have assumed that the reader is familiar with viral marketing, its process, its applicability, its features, its benefits, its pros, and its cons. In this regard, we have provided extensive statistics in Exhibit 1, list of books in Exhibit 2, list of trade articles in Exhibit 3, and list of academic research papers in Exhibit 4.
We hope that this white paper will:
1. Demonstrate to marketers that viral marketing has become more of an interactive and collaborative science than a haphazard creative art – it is a discipline that can produce predictable and measurable results with handsome returns on the investment;
2. Convince marketers to deploy viral marketing from their own corporate web site; and
3. Encourage marketers to employ the proposed ten best practices.
Despite the fact that viral marketing has been around for some time, unfortunately, due to its complexity, there are no best practices to follow and no measurements to apply to manage the process. As a result, companies have taken a “hit & miss” approach and have treated viral marketing more of an art than a science.
So far, viral marketing has been compared to the weather: fairly important, but not much you can do about it. While viral marketing can certainly claim some great success stories under its belt despite the lack of tools, yet its record is stained with some black marks due to some failures which could be avoided in the future by formalizing and automating the viral marketing process.
Viral marketing illustrates the virus metaphor:
Inoculation of the promoted meme which could be an idea, product, service, activity, job, person, company, etc.
Incubation of the meme – usage of the meme by innovators and early adopters inoculated by the meme
Spreading of the meme – infecting others by the meme
Viral marketing is hardly incidental or episodic. Instead, it evolves according to some basic principles concentrated on conversational values. While conventional marketing focuses on the item being promoted and attempts to influence through advertising which is a broadcasting paradigm, viral marketing focuses on the contagious factor and tries to infect through word of mouth which is a peer-to-peer paradigm.
Knowing the targeted market is usually good enough in conventional marketing, while discovering what moves the market is critical in viral marketing. Viral marketing is strategic and organic at the grassroots level. It attempts to let customers do the talking by turning them into not just sales representatives but an army of enthusiastic evangelists. Companies can now predict the spread of word of mouth by analyzing how customers interact and infect one another. It relies on both seeding and referring by focusing more on infecting than influencing.
Viral marketing ignites and fosters conversation among constituents using sophisticated Social Network Analysis (SNA) to analyze an entire Social Network and its individual nodes using graph theory analyses such as clustering, centrality, structural equivalence, structural holes, E/I Ratio, small worlds, etc. This is where viral marketing becomes more of an interactive and collaborative science than a haphazard creative art – the science of Social Networks that grew out of sociology and anthropology.
We propose the following ten best practices that cover the iterative viral marketing process: (1) positioning the item being promoted; (2) crafting the compelling message; (3) creating proper incentives; (4) establishing communications; (5) defining the rules of engagement; (6) seeding and encouraging referrals; (7) focusing on infecting more than on influencing; (8) analyzing Social Networks to identify the Mavens, Influencers, Connectors, and Spreaders (MICS); (9) simulating, launching, managing, and measuring viral marketing campaigns using a Referral Automation System that empowers a corporate web site; and (10) collecting feedback to further refine the viral marketing campaigns.
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