

What's Your Startup's Virality Coefficient? - shafqat
http://blog.newscred.com/?p=79

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iamdave
Okay, I am honestly getting fed up with more and more people trying to become
WOM experts. Before you know it, WOM will become the new SEO because we all
think it's something we can slap on like a plastic goldpainted badge and
everyone will somehow take us as if we have more profundity than we deserve.

Just because it's called viral marketing doesn't mean it's truly viral. Just
because you upload it to YouTube and get 200 viewers doesn't make it viral.
Just because you do all the same things other _true_ viral videos do, and make
use of social content, doesn't make it viral. Especially if you only get 2
page views.

Leeroy Jenkins, 2girls1cup, THOSE were viral because they shook the entire
Internet cage, and they didn't run around screaming "OMG I'M VIRAL OMG I'M
VIRAL PAY ATTENTION TO ME". That kind of mentality doesn't bode well, it
hasn't since grade school. Calling your product marketing campaign viral and
then SHOVING it in the faces of others by calling it viral takes away from the
true essence of social media if what you produce comes up short, or doesn't
come up at all. The thought begins to ruminate "Is this really all the web has
to offer? Sad advertisements that try to appeal to me simply because it's an
advertisement on YouTube? Wow I need to get something better" and we all lose.
Nobody wins.

~~~
TrevorJ
/Agree.

I have always disliked the term "Viral Marketing" since it is simply Adspeak
for the mechanism by which people discovered useful knowledge before there
where any ad agencies around at all.

Sure, the Internet has compressed the time period that this happens in and has
allowed for the phenomenon (hate to even call it that) to be easily tracked
with the sorts of numbers agency guys and businessmen, live and die by but in
the end the true genius of "Viral" Marketing is that by giving it that name
Agencies have packaged something people have done for thousands of years and
turned it into a product to sell.

Does it work? Sure. But come on guys, you are MARKETING people...couldn't you
have at least named it something more..Positive sounding?

