Viral marketing doesn't exist

I had a fun brainstorm with the management team of a local (Seattle based) online business today. One of the things I mentioned in our chat and something I've believed for some time now is that viral marketing doesn't exist.

One dictionary definition of "marketing" is: "The total of activities involved in the transfer of goods from the producer or seller to the consumer or buyer, including advertising, shipping, storing, and selling." Viral action involves a transfer from a customer to another customer. The only thing you do is to facilitate that transfer.

Because there is no direct communication between you and this new prospective customer, I believe that the 'marketing' part of 'viral marketing' is a misnomer. One should instead refer to 'viral mechanisms' if you're going to have any sort of useful communication about all things viral.

It's also more helpful to think about the viral propagation of your product, service or message in terms of creating viral mechanisms rather than viral marketing. Thinking about viral marketing will have you trying to find ways to get your customers to force your brand down their friends throat. The first thing you'll come up with is the "tell a friend about us" link on your website. Have you ever clicked a "tell a friend" link?

The original viral mechanism was Hotmail's email signature offering you a free email account. It was an ad that was happily sent along with every email sent via Hotmail. That viral mechanism is an integral part of Hotmail's value proposition.

Here are some other examples of sites where you participate in some viral mechanism to extract maximum value:

• HotOrNot.com - Post your photo (or a hapless friends photo) and then tell your friends: "Check it out! I posted his photo!" - on HotOrNot.com
• YouTube - post a video and tell everyone you know to check it out - on YouTube
• Blogger - Check out my latest blog post - on Blogger
• LinkedIn - To get any value from a social networking site you have to have a network. Invite your friends and end up with a self maintaining list of those you invited and those they invited. Yay, self maintaining contact lists! I don't think much of sites that purely offer social networking. MySpace rolled personal webpages and blogs into social networking which is why they killed LinkedIn and Friendster.

Sites that facilitate communication of some sort are often inherently viral. Sites that offer one way communication are not. Here are some examples of sites that aren't viral:

• Job search engines (I know, I used to run one which was one of Time's top 50 websites of 2005)
• Retail sites like Amazon.com and Wine.com (I worked for eToys.com)
• News sites like CNN and the BBC (I worked for the Beeb too)

To test if you're truly viral, ask yourself the following question: "Does extracting value from our web application require our users to communicate our existence to people they know?"

If the answer is 'Yes!" then viral mechanisms are an integral part of your value proposition and you can stop reading this dry stuff and do something more productive.

Mark.
Founder & CEO, Geojoey.com

Comments

[joe]

I've found it useful to turn the problem around and go bottom-up. I try to think of how active users would want to evangalize my product, and then build features to enable them to do that most naturally and effortlessly. (It helps to have a kick-ass product that people will want to evangalize)

[Mark]

Hi Joe,

I think what you've described is the thing you should do after you've built viral mechanisms into your product.

Take the Hotmail example. The Hotmail sig is sent with every email message to every users friend or acquaintance, whether the sender wants to evangelize your product or not. Simple use of the application makes it viral.

Same with LinkedIn. By adding someone to your network who isn't a member, you're inviting friends to the site whether you love the product or wished you'd joined myspace but have too much invested in LinkedIn.

Once you've created these mechanisms, only then should one think about how to allow the true evangelists to aggressively wave your flag. In other words, if someone wants to email 50 friends purely about the fact that your site exists, then give them a way to do that.

Viral mechanisms are an integral part of your business model and product. If someone uses your product or does business with you, some sort of viral action occurs.

Mark.