Hindsight, foresight and viral marketing
Let's say the end goal is to have a self-sustaining viral campaign in which 100,000 unique visitors download a particular tool each month. Those 100,000 visitors are the ones acting upon the viral suggestion. The step back from that is, "How many people are necessary to sustain that conversion rate?" One hundred thousand visitors represent 20 percent of the traffic using the numbers given above. This means 500,000 -- half a million -- unique visitors per month are required to sustain 100,000 downloads a month.
But we're dealing with a viral campaign, so sustaining the conversion rate is actually secondary to, "How many people need to receive the message in order for half a million people to visit the site each month?"
This question is the next step back, and it is where the seven questions at the start of this column start getting answered.
Now determine how the viral message is to be transmitted. Word of Mouth alone? Will there be an email component? Will some other transmission vector be involved?
At this point some of the NextStage research I've discussed previously can come into play: does the transmission method involve trust and fair-exchange between people sending and receiving the viral message?
If yes, the message propagates and flourishes.
If no, the campaign dies a lonely death.
Knowing how the viral message will be transmitted is crucial and each transmission method needs to be monitored in order to recognize when any given method is drying up and when unexpected ones are revealing themselves.
For the sake of example, let's use round numbers-- there will be two transmission vectors per sender and each sender will contact ten people. Each vector will fail after one million "sends."
This means the viral message needs to start in (for example) pure word of mouth, then change to email and word of mouth, and then change to pure email at some point in time between the start of the campaign and its fifth iteration.
If you send an email to a friend using the rules listed here, the campaign needs to switch vectors right after your friend's friend's friend's friend tells their friend in order for the campaign to continue to propagate.
The next step back is, "How fast should the message spread?" This is a critical question because there is such a thing as too fast. An excellent message that spreads too quickly gets lost because it doesn't stay in anyone's mind long enough to make an impression. Too slow and the best message never gets reinforced enough to be acted upon. Using our above numbers, decisions about how soon from the start of the campaign to 100,000 downloads a month needs to happen and how long it should continue need to be made.
The last question that needs to be answered in this simplified schema takes us back to the beginning of the campaign: How many individuals are required to start the campaign in order to meet the campaign's goals?
Our example above started with a single person and assumed each person receiving the message sent it on to a uniform 10 contacts. We didn't take into account people who are "immune" to the campaign or who pass the message on but do not act upon it themselves.
Starting the campaign with one person and using the 20 percent conversion factor means the message never gets out or does so too slowly to be useful. Time-to-fruition and end-goal requirements help pinpoint what the seed population needs to be and some good rules of thumb are:
(Large end population) x (long time to fruition) = 12 to 15 percent of end population as seed
(Large end population) x (short time to fruition) = 25 percent of end population as seed
The catalyst in these formulae is the MCE. A high MCE equates to a shorter time to fruition or smaller seed. A low MCE means longer time to fruition or larger seed. Organic growth of a viral message can work very well, but only if you're providing something an audience -- which might not know you exist -- wants and is willing to go looking for it, and this equates to a very high MCE.
Note: If you're in Boston on August 17, 2006, I'll be presenting research on "Increasing Knowledge Transfer by Adapting Information Presentation Style on the Fly" at the Boston KM Forum.
Joseph Carrabis is CRO and Founder of NextStage Evolution and NextStage Global. Read full bio.