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07 Dec 09

Lessons Learned – Viral Marketing – For Entrepreneurs

www.forentrepreneurs.com/lessons-learnt-viral-marketing - Preview

viral marketing

A short study of this web site reveals that a hugely important factor for success in startup companies is finding ways to acquire customers at a low cost. In the Business Models section, we looked at the perfect business model: Viral customer acquisition with good monetization.
To give you a preview of this post, what you will learn is that there are two key parameters that drive how viral growth happens, the Viral Coefficient, and the Viral Cycle Time.
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- In YouTube’s case the Viral Cycle Time was extremely short: a user would come to the site, see a funny video, and immediately send the link on to their friends. Tabblo, on the other hand, had a much longer cycle time. A customer would post some photos on the site and invite their friends. The friends might see the photos on Tabblo, and like the experience and decide that they would use the site the next time they took photos they wanted to share. However, that is where the problem came in: it could take months before they next took photos, and decided to share them.
- The most viral products are those that only work if they are shared. For example, Skype only worked in the early days if you got your friends on to Skype, otherwise you had now way to call them. If you have an application today, think about how you can make it social, where it would work better by sharing data with friends/co-workers. That provides a great incentive for customers to invite their friends/colleagues to use the application.
- You should also be looking for ways to encourage customers to invite people at various junctures in their use of the application. And of course, you should be asking yourself the question: is the value proposition of your product really that compelling that your customers will want to share it with others?
- Another great way to increase virality is to incent customers with a reward for every customer they successfully convert. Since this can result in an individual feeling guilty that they are making money off their friends, the best way to do this is to also provide the friend that is receiving the invitation with an equal incentive. Now your customer will feel like they are doing their friends a favor.

06 Jul 09

danieltenner.com — How to make your application viral

danieltenner.com/...ke-your-application-viral.html - Preview

viral

The cornerstone of all discussion of the viral loop considers the cycle from acquiring a new user to having them invite others. In equation form:

viral coefficient = (average number of users invited by each active user who invites someone) x (proportion of invited users that actually join or become active) x (proportion of active users that invite others)
In my opinion, if you rely on abusing people’s contact lists for your viral growth, you’re only a few rungs above ordinary spammers. Many reputable companies still do it today, but I don’t think this is something they should be proud of.
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- viral growth does not and should not require dirty tricks. I do not condone any form of spam or other abuse of your users’ precious trust, if only for the reason that once users stop trusting you, it is very difficult to regain that trust – as far as business applications are concerned, this sort of behaviour can kill your reputation dead. None of the principles below require any form of underhanded behaviour to be effective.
- try to only do things on a user’s behalf when they’ve explicitly done something to request that thing, and they know that what they’ve done will result in a communication being sent on their behalf.
- certain kinds of applications (e.g. collaboration tools) lend themselves to the concept of inviting others, as part of the core usage of the application. If you can architect your product so that it is one of these applications, that will greatly enhance your viral spread. This cannot be latched onto any application. It needs to be as integral to your application as “getting people wet” is integral to the use of a water pistol.
- Top Friends did that extremely well. The core usage of Top Friends is to select your top friends and rank them. As part of this process, you are naturally asked to tell the friends about this ranking business, and thus they are invited to use the app themselves.
- Mob Wars, a Facebook game, applies this concept by constantly reminding its users that new features will be unlocked if they invite more of their friends.
- Most users will not invite other people when until they’re familiar with an application. If you don’t provide them with something to do before they’re ready to invite others, you will probably lose them long before they reach that stage.

16 Aug 08

Viral Marketing and Thought Leadership Strategies

www.davidmeermanscott.com - Preview

viral marketing people

The Key to Effective Viral Marketing is Emotional Engagement

www.doshdosh.com/keting-is-emotional-engagement - Preview

Viral marketing

People encounter specific data or ideas daily and pass it on to their friends and other people in their network. All things equal, one can say that information is shared more rapidly when the recipient has a strong emotional connection with the specific message. They adore it. They despise it. They are deeply puzzled by it. It makes them upset. It makes them happy.