

Learning Viral: Is your product a natural or add-on? - crxnamja
http://okdork.com/2008/04/30/learning-viral-add-on-or-natural/
An idea I learned from a leading venture capitalist about building viral as the core of your product...Thoughts?
======
mattjung
Was Google Search a natural or add-on? None of them. It was just extremely
useful and spread the world virally nevertheless...

~~~
crxnamja
google was neither, it was just an awesome product that with word of mouth and
a great partnership with yahoo/aol grew to epic proportions. it's as pg says
build something people want. i would say 'need'

------
rnjohnson
evite...as much as we can't stand how it looks gets this natural virality
thing going.

"I'm invited to a party? Well, yes, I'll rsvp and invite other cool people..."

~~~
crxnamja
definitely agree about evite. surprised that other event based sites haven't
taken off as well. guess is that younger crowd = facebook events and older
crowd on email, outlook meeting requests and evite.

------
boredguy8
You "go viral" by making people fans of your product, whatever it is. It's no
more (or less) complicated than that.

~~~
rewind
I think there's a lot more to it than that. As a simple example, you can have
the best solitaire game out there and every one of your users may love it, but
there is nothing viral about that. Even if you get a great review on a blog
and a million users download it after reading the review, it's still not
viral. It's just popular. It doesn't have a built-in mechanism for spreading
from one user to another. You can argue that it goes viral by users
recommending it to other users, but that requires active behavior from the
user that has nothing to do with using the game.

Now if you take a multi-player game where I have to send out an invite to
another user to play, that's viral. It's built into the game. That's why a
game like Scrabulous can spread so quickly within Facebook (and that's how I
was introduced to it).

There is another comment here that Google is viral. I think that's another
example of popular, not viral. I can use Google 100 times a day to search, but
there is nothing that I'm doing that introduces Google to other users unless I
just actively send them an email. Hotmail, on the other hand, seems more viral
to me because, as a user, I'm using it just to send mail, but I'm passively
promoting it to every person I send an email to because there is a link in the
message -- I don't need to do anything other than just use the product for its
intended purpose for it to be viral. That won't happen with Google.

Some might argue that some videos are viral even though the user has to
actively pass the link on to someone else, but I don't think that's how a site
or an application becomes viral. Also, most content goes viral because it's
posted a relatively small number of times to sites with relatively large
numbers of visitors (Digg, for example).

I may be off-track here as far as what most people consider viral, but I get
the sense that in general, to be viral, the increase in users has to be either
from passive behavior of existing users (like Hotmail) or because there is a
real benefit to an existing user by introducing new users (like Scrabulous or
even Facebook in general). Maybe the term "viral" has been so overused that it
is now synonymous with "popular". If that's the case, then you can ignore this
entire reply ;-)

~~~
boredguy8
"Viral marketing has quickly achieved recognition because of a handful of
high-profile examples: Marketers demonstrated that on shoestring budgets they
could motivate millions. They did so by leveraging customer-to-customer
communication to increase sales, brand awareness, and market coverage.

To date, however, marketers have had difficulty reproducing the success of a
handful of viral campaigns, such as 'The Blair Witch Project,' HotMail, and
the 'Dancing Baby.'"

Viral marketing requires things achieve popularity through word-of-mouth
replication, not big-budget marketing. So if my solitaire gets 20 good reviews
that get 20 downloads each, and spawns 20 more good reviews, &c., it is
virally successful. You might not like that that's how the term is used, but
you're about 7 years too late.

( <http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=837321> )

