Going Viral

What does going viral really mean? Going viral is that moment when your users are willingly carrying your message or sharing your product to their friends, family and colleagues at a rate that eliminates or significantly diminishes the need for traditional marketing or advertising support.

Going viral sounds easy in theory but it is very difficult to achieve and even more difficult to maintain for an extended period of time driving continuous organic growth.

How do you know when your business or product has hit that tipping point? Your business is at this tipping point when you start to see a numerical logic to growth that to most will look like a sudden spike but to your analytics managers shows a model for how each new or engaged user impacts growth including the source of the new user and activities of the engaged user that lead to sharing and sign ups.

How do you build a strategy for going viral? This is the most difficult part. Sometimes we think that companies just get lucky. In my opinion there is no luck in going viral.

The ability to go viral begins with the right type of content and user experience. What is truly unique, engaging, share-worthy, competitive, fun... There are many attributes to a product or content that can make it go viral but the one common denominator is user value. What value does the user get from sharing your content or site?

The value can be simple ego "I am the best and I want everyone to know"... think farmville and mafia wars... The value can also change. Look at foursquare, at first it is just fun "I am here" checking in seeing who else is doing what, that fun progresses to ego "I want to be the mayor of my favorite bar and I want all of my friends to know I am the mayor of our favorite bar". Then the value changes to "where are my friends tonight? Johnny checked in at Monks, Alice is at Continental Midtown and Tony is at Chickies and Petes".

Value is the one thing you can't fake and that's why the simplest activities or pieces of content can go viral. Whether going viral is enough to make a cool idea a good business... that is a different story all together. Maybe one day we will stop repeating the same mistakes "get a bunch of users and figure out how to monetize them later"... sound familiar... the bubble...