Past Paradigms of Viral Marketing

In the past few years we've all started to understand the value of social media, the importance of great content, and the great success that can be had when one reaches the so called "tipping point" of virility when promoting their content. 

As a general rule of thumb, in order to get something to really "go viral" successfully, a piece of content must have more people sharing that content than the number of people abandoning that content without sharing it. Say, for instance, you have a piece of content that does well on Digg. It hits the front page and gets you 60k visitors. In order to maintain virility, those 60k visitors must do something to generate more than 60k additional visitors.  

Given the average scenario, hardly anyone has truly viral content. Of the hypothetical 60k Digg visitors, maybe a few hundred people will share the content, generating an additional 10-20k visitors from other sources. Those additional 20k visitors might push another 10k visitors, and those last 10k visitors might push another 5k visitors. You get the picture, and it’s not a pretty one: you will continue to see diminished result until it slows to a near trickle, at which point, the piece of content has reached the end of its life cycle. 

So what does this mean for me?

For the average internet marketer, it means that you must rely on getting your piece of content A LOT of initial exposure in order to see significant results. This leads to the frustration of trying to front page Digg, reddit, or others, because they are the only place to get this kind of initial exposure.

Now imagine that you could create something that was fully viral, meaning that its share rate exceeded its abandonment at all points in its life cycle. This would mean that you would no longer need that huge audience to launch it successfully. In theory, you could start it with just a  hundred visitors.

Say you have a truly viral piece of content, and you promote it on StumbleUpon and the site sends you 100 visitors.  Those 100 visitors send you an additional 200 visitors, those 200 visitors then send 400 visitors. You get the point -- it's exponential, at least until the point of saturation.   

Easy, right? Not so fast: creating something that is truly viral can be very difficult, but they all have a few things in common:

1. They are interesting and appeal to the audience in some base way (humor, sex, narcissism, fear, greed, and a few others).
2. They require participation and sharing in order for visitors to attain full value from the content.
3. They make participation and sharing very fast and very easy.

THAT'S IT. Now for an example. 

The Interesting Content:

http://ihateyoujulia.com/ (SFW) is a website that's basically a scam, but a very, very successful one. The author presents himself as a wronged boyfriend whose girlfriend cheated on him and is very deserving of revenge.  His revenge is to post risqué images of his girlfriend on the site. The only catch is that most of the images (the sexy ones) are "locked" and require user participation in order to be seen

The Requirement

Here's the hook: in order to see all of the pictures visitors must share the website with their friends. New pictures are revealed with each new visitor that individuals refer to the site via a unique URL. Each visitor who wants to see all the sexy images must refer 50+ visitors to the site themselves. 

Why it Works

It works because it fits all the criteria mentioned: interesting content, required sharing and participation, and ease of sharing. Ihateyoujulia.com has gotten more than 13k links according to Yahoo! Site Explorer, and has seen massive traffic as well to be sure.

My Experience:

I first learned of the concept talked about here a while ago, but got around to writing the script for and implementing something similar just last week.  The resulting traffic of the first few days after its release was interesting, however, I was not the creator of Ihateyoujulia.com, and will not be divulging the site I did create.

Final Thoughts

Ideas such as the one mentioned present an incredible new way of thinking about viral marketing. By requiring participation at some level, you are adding an entirely new way to control how viral your piece of content becomes. To be sure, this is just one idea of many that fit into this new niche of viral marketing -- that is really more of an exercise in social engineering than anything else.  I'm very interested in hearing the community's opinions on this idea.