
Viral Growth Pisses Me Off - dohertyjf
http://www.johnfdoherty.com/viral-growth-pisses/
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idoh
Facebook virals can definitely work. I know this because I'm the PM for an app
that has grown virally 1.75% a day (on average) over the last eight months.

People see a disconnect because they think that the mere presence of like
widgets or some open graph actions will cause viral growth, and then when it
doesn't happen they get frustrated.

What works for virals isn't obvious - the app has two FTEs working on virals
and the results are consistently counterintuitive, but the nice thing is that
what works does seem to be consistant across apps.

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jcc80
Interesting article - the only question I had was about the "Pay with a tweet"
to get upgrade/unlock extra features. I've started seeing this and actually
thought it was kind of clever. Are most annoyed by this?

I understand the point of the article though that you're missing out on the
impact of big influencers as they're not likely to tweet to their thousands
upon thousands of followers.

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CJefferson
I would never 'pay with a tweet', unless I made it completely clear that I was
being forced to do it, and didn't actually agree with anything I was saying. I
suspect that wouldn't make the person paying happy.

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jcc80
Interesting, I guess if I had more than a few followers I'd feel the same. For
now though, I just go ahead because I figure nobody's going to see it anyways.

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dustyreagan
I feel like the author is too hard on TwitterCounter. Granted I'm not a paying
customer, but their pay wall seems like it's in a reasonable spot to me. Am I
in the minority on this one?

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clarky07
While I agree with most of this, I disagree with the part about
TwitterCounter. It seems perfectly reasonable to me to offer something of
value in exchange for a tweet about the service.

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dohertyjf
Hey Clarky, it wasn't necessarily about the PWAT integration, it was the lack
of an alternative. I'd give them my email address instead of giving them a
tweet, for example.

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planetguy
While I agree with the basic idea, how ironic that it's written by an "SEO
Consultant", that _other_ class of internet bottom-feeder trying to cram stuff
into my attention space for their own personal benefit.

Viral marketing and SEO: the two worst parasites of the internet.

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dohertyjf
Except I'm obviously not THAT kind of SEO consultant who is trying to cram
stuff you don't like down your throat. If you read my other stuff on there,
you'd realize that I'm all about cool things and providing as much value as
possible. That was exactly my issue with these examples I gave - they provided
nothing, so why should I give them anything?

Same with marketing. If I don't provide you value, I don't deserve your
attention or your links or whatever.

Lumping the sheisters with the legit ones is unfair. I could just as easily
say that developers are the scum of the Internet because some write programs
that hack sites and steal credit card information. But then I'd be lumping all
developers into the same category of scum, making the same logical fallacy
you're making.

Just my two cents.

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joshklein
I think it's worth acknowledging the branding problem identifying yourself as
an SEO consultant creates. You're obviously a competent marketer - not just a
channel expert - so you may want to rethink your presentation of yourself.

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dohertyjf
Fair enough there, Josh. I actually usually introduce myself as an online
marketer, because I do a lot of other sorts of marketing too - content, CRO,
and social. I started in SEO and technically work for an SEO consultancy, but
our tagline is "Smarter Online Marketing". It's a work in progress :-)

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contentmuse
hopefully this wakes some businesspeople up.. read it!

