Viral Marketing: Starting an
Online Word-of-Mouth Epidemic
Stephan Spencer
President, Internet Concepts
sspencer@netconcepts.com
www.netconcepts.com
The Problem: Data Smog
• Not only are you competing with your
competitors for their eyeballs and their loyalty,
but also the information glut that fills the Internet
and everyone’s lives.
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Hear the NPR interview of David Shenk, author of “Data Smog: Surviving the
Information Glut” at <http://www.npr.org/ramarchives/ne7a0301-6.ram>
Just Say No!
• Interruption marketing just doesn’t work anymore
– Unanticipated, impersonal, and irrelevant ads won’t
break through the data smog
• Stop marketing at people. Get out of the way and
let people market your products to each other.
The Solution: Viral Marketing
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Putting together the right offer
Who’s going to spread your message?
Making it easy…(email & web)
Potential traps and hazards
Best and worst practices
Case studies
What is viral marketing?
• Word of mouth marketing augmented by digital
communication
• Facilitate the process of people referring their
friends and colleagues
– to purchase your products, visit your site, sign up for
a free trial, subscribe to your newsletter, etc.
Word-of-Mouth on Steroids
• Traditional WOM
– Travels slowly
– Dies off
– E.g. recommend a book
to some friends
• Digitally augmented
WOM
– Spreads fast
– Travels far
– Exponential growth
(amplification)
– E.g. Hotmail
Some New Jargon
• Sneezer, ideavirus, vector, hive, tipping point,
connector, maven, promiscuous, powerful,
smooth, amplifier, persistence, word-of-mouse,
network effect, Law of the Few, Zipf’s Law,
Metcalf’s Law, compounding effect, etc.
• Gotta love buzzwords!
Putting together the right offer
• Is your idea virusworthy?
• Ideaviruses love a vacuum
Who’s going to spread your
message?
• Seth Godin calls them “sneezers”
– “Promiscuous sneezers” - have their price
– “Powerful sneezers” - can’t be bought; difficult to predict what
will motivate them
• Malcolm Gladwell breaks them out differently
– “Connectors” - masters of the ‘loose tie,’ seem to know
everybody
– “Mavens” - genuinely helpful
– “Salespeople” - born to sell
Divide and conquer
• Go after a demographic or psychographic group
where your ‘ideavirus’ can dominate
• Like people hang out together (e.g. the affluent
mix in the same circles)
• Target those sympathetic to your cause
– BMW dealership - don’t target Ford owners
Observe who’s sneezing!
• Identify your top sneezers by tracking ratio of
“unique opens” for each message sent
– 0 = didn’t open
– 1 = recipient opened but didn’t forward
– 2+ = recipient probably forwarded (unless they check
mail from multiple PCs)
• Reward and incent these sneezers! They’re
worth their weight in gold.
Rewarding your ‘sneezers’
• Don’t insist that a referrer’s friend become a customer to
earn the incentive. That’s outside his/her control.
• Make sure the incentive is relevant to the recipient.
• It doesn’t have to be expensive.
• e.g. golf balls with the recipient’s name printed on them
• DON’T change the rules mid-campaign
Gotta give to get
• Don’t just give a speech and leave
– Fly in your customers to tell their stories
– Sponsor a cocktail party afterward
• Don’t just tell them how your product is safe and secure; give
them a first aid kit for their car
• 3M Post-It Notes:
– Secretary of 3M’s chairman sent a free case to secretaries of chairmen of
the Fortune 500
• MCI Mail:
– Blew it - built friction into the system by charging instead of giving it away
to build critical mass
Network Effect
• Metcalf’s Law - the value of a network increases
with the square of the number of people using it
• A world with 1000 fax machines is 250,000 times
better than one with only 2
Power of bestseller lists
• Zipf’s Law - #1 is MUCH more popular than #2
• Stanford study: artificially boosting bestseller
status of downloaded files
• Self fulfilling prophecy
• If you can’t dominate one, create your own
Make it easy for people to
“pass it on”
• Ask recipients to forward your e-newsletter,
email, or SMS message to friends
• Include on your site “Email this page to a friend”
buttons to refer your articles, products, etc.
• Make it a fill-in form that allows the visitor to pass
it on to a number of people at once
– e.g. Ideavirus.com’s “Send It” page
Soft sell
• Not a blatant, in-your-face demand but an
informal invitation
• Should not smack of commercialism or spam
• e.g. a blank postcard with a funny cartoon
referencing the book and its topic
The customer is in control
• Of the content
• Of the frequency
• Of the relationship
Success stories
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Hotmail
HOTorNOT.com
Quixtar
Unleashing the Ideavirus
Blue Mountain Arts
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Google
SETI@home
Budweiser parody
Absolut
Gaming company
Etc.
Hotmail
• Appended a small plug to every outgoing email: “Get
Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com”
• Founded in 1996. By Summer 1998, had 25 million
active accounts
• Signs up over 150,000 subscribers per day, each of
them profiles themselves upon registering
• Founder (Sabeer Bhatia) sold to Microsoft for $500
million
• Sabeer invented the term “viral marketing”
HOTorNOT.com
• Formerly AmIHotorNot.com
• View photos of strangers and rate their looks from 1 to 10 or post
your own photo
• Launched by 2 unemployed Californians on a whim and with no
funding
• A MediaMetrix Top 50 most visited site
• Peaked at 14.8 million page views in a single day
Quixtar
• Amway e-commerce site
• Distributor hands out a business card with their
referral code, required to log in to the site
• MLM
“Unleashing the Ideavirus”
• Book by Seth Godin - in paperback, hardcover, and ebook format
• Free to download from the web at www.ideavirus.com
• Web site also allows you to easily email it to all your
friends
• Most downloaded e-book in history
• An Amazon.com best seller
Blue Mountain Arts
• Online greeting card site (bluemountain.com)
• Sender chooses an e-card on the site, site then
sends an email to the recipient prompting them
to click on the link to pick up the card
• Recipient is encouraged to send their own ecard
Google
• Now the most popular search engine on the
planet
• Came out of nowhere to dethrone the
incumbents
• Spent no money on advertising
• A great service - most relevant results, fastest,
and most complete
SETI@home
• Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence
• Analyzing noise from space
• More than 2 million PCs crunching numbers in
their spare time, for no compensation
• Propagated by ‘powerful sneezers’
• Persistent
Budweiser Parody
• “Wassup Superfriends”
• Budweiser, wisely, didn’t interfere
• Further burned Budweiser’s brand and ad
campaign into our subconscious
Absolut
• Planted attractive women as paid sneezers at bars
• When men asked to buy them a drink: “Absolut gin &
tonic”
• After a while, everyone was ordering Absolut gin &
tonics
• Imagine now paying the bar to post a bestselling drinks
list, then it becomes persistent!
Handheld video game maker
• Gave them away to the ‘popular kids’
• On the condition that they play with them on the
schoolyard
More examples
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ICQ
Ebay
Paypal
Vindigo
Napster
Hamsterdance
Ready, Aim, Misfire.
• Southwest - negative WOM spreading like
wildfire
• SMEI Auckland free CD campaign - lukewarm
results
• Amazon.com email campaign - signed “Big Bird,
King of the World, Amazon.com”
• Email marketer’s newsletter - “Ream more”
Southwest Airlines
SMEI Auckland
• Incentive for referring workshop registrant leads: a free CD on
“Guerrilla Selling”
• Auckland chapter’s first experiment with viral marketing was a
non-starter
• Why?
– Uncompelling incentive? Non-virusworthy product being pitched? Poorly
presented? Wrong target audience?
• Had good tracking of referral sources (both partners and
individual sneezers)
• www.smei.co.nz/freecd.php
In Summary
• Viral marketing dwarfs traditional WOM
• Identify your best sneezers
• Make a compelling offering and exploit the
sneezers’ motivations
• Make it easy to spread (“smooth”)
• You can influence, but not control
Further Reading
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Unleashing the Ideavirus by Seth Godin
The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
www.digitrends.net/marketing/13640_10856.html
www.cbi.cgey.com/journal/issue6/unleashIdea.html
www.webdevelopersjournal.com/articles/site_promotion/
sticky_viral_site.html
• www.wellsfargo.com/biz/products/resources/advisor/arc
hives/08viral/07viral.jhtml