Earlier this year I read a paper called “Modeling Blog Dynamics” in which they propose a method of modeling the spread of links through the blogosphere using zero-crossing random walks and exploitation vs. exploration applied to a logical flowchart model:

The authors suggested that the model could be used in influence maximization algorithms which aim to identify key, influential individuals in a given social network for the purposes of viral marketing. I was intrigued by the possibilities and have been tossing around a possible flowchart model of how individuals decide to ReTweet specific Tweets since reading that paper. Here’s my first attempt:

There are three steps in the process where a marketer can increase the chances of a specific Tweet being ReTweeted. The first step indicates that a user must be following the sender of the target Tweet; the second step means that they must actually see the Tweet in question (try to imagine what percentage of your friend’s timeline you actually see). Step three is where the user must find some motivation to ReTweet it.

Maximizing the number of followers the Tweet’s original sender has is fairly straightforward, and most of my Science of ReTweets data has explored the ReTweet motivation percentage. I had not put much effort into analyzing statistics around the attention problem, but I’ve begun to.

Because there is no way to exactly measure what percentage of followers will actually read a given Tweet, the next best metric we have is click through percentages, so that is what I’ve been working with. You can expect to see more work to that end in the next few weeks.

My work has been concentrated on maximizing the contagiousness of ideas, whereas much of the aforementioned academic work focuses on the people involved in spreading ideas. So you can also expect to see me advance the concepts of “ReTweetability” I began a few months ago with the purpose of identifying influential users.

Download @DanZarrella's Readability Analyzer Plugin for Wordpress Here

Download the Science of ReTweets Report here.

Don't forget to follow me on Twitter

Is the social web becoming a dangerous platform for contagious, destructive ideas? As social media usage grows and becomes a hive mind of collective consciousness, it enables a number of positive things to happen, but it also presents a grave danger in the form of dangerous memes.

Dan Dennet gave a great TED talk that I’ve mentioned before where he explores dangerous memes. He defines these as parasitic ideas that subordinate genetic interests, in that they can flourish and spread even when they cause harm to the people who contract them. Examples of these are “ideas to die for” like communism, capitalism, religion, fascism and contagious suicide.

Memes are ideas that act as viruses and spread from person to person. In biological infection extreme dense populations often form worst breeding grounds. Many of history’s deadliest outbreaks started in the extremely dense populations of Asia. Cholera started in Bengal and spread across India in the early eighteen hundreds. The black death is widely believed to have begun in central Asia and the third bubonic plague pandemic began in the Yunnan province of China in 1855

If memes are idea viruses, population density can be compared to technologies that bring minds closer together. Social media not only does this, but it also increases the reach available to a single infected person and the frequency of contact that other minds have with new ideas.

The old, industrial media regime had several buffering factors that hindered the spread of contagious ideas. The gatekeepers of broadcast media companies often did extensive fact checking on new stories. The speed and frequency of idea transmission under the old media was also much less than that presented by social media.

We’ve already begun to see the beginnings of dangerous meme outbreaks in social media. Many are relatively benign like the celebrity death hoaxes of stars like Tila Tequila, Britney Spears and Zach Braff. We’ve all seen examples of incorrect “facts” spreading across Twitter at lightening speed through ReTweets and stock prices have felt the pain of a rumor posted to a social site.

More sinister variations on this theme have also begun to emerge including a suspected “web-based Suicide Cults” in England and Japan, a “flash mob riot” in Philadelphia, online gang recruitment, and racist and neo-Nazi social networking. The giant Unification Church “cult” also has strong presences on Facebook and Youtube.

These phenomenon are likely only the tip of the iceberg. How long will it be before a dangerous cult, racist faction or mass-panic inducing hoax emerges that has been specifically designed for social media contagiousness?

Download @DanZarrella's Readability Analyzer Plugin for Wordpress Here

Download the Science of ReTweets Report here.

Don't forget to follow me on Twitter

When marketers think about “going viral,” they think about creating infectious content and getting it in front of the right people. And while that’s a great place to start, contagious design can also go a long way to help. Here’s 7 things to think about when designing a blog or site for maximum viral effect.

Timeliness & Urgency

Breaking news is one of the most contagious types of content, in every form I’ve studied. From social news and voting to Twitter, if you are the first to cover some important information, you’ll almost assuredly go viral. The reasons for this include the importance of information scarcity and the reputation-boost that comes from being the first to know about something cool.

• Color: Use hot colors to emphasize new content– think about how CNN.com highlights breaking news in yellow at the top of the page.
• Time and Date Stamps: Most blog themes include time and date of posting, but you should work to make this information as prominent as possible on fresh content. Perhaps even go so far as to remove, or downplay, this element on old content to reduce a reader’s resistance to sharing “stale” information.
• Positioning: Be sure to place links to the newest content on a site in prominent locations, even on older content. Again, notice CNN.com’s breaking news block.

Social Proof

People are much more likely to spread content if other people have also spread it. Think about long email chain letter forward headers, or ReTweets with multiple usernames included. Informational cascades are a strong example of this kind of behavior from economics and game theory. Signs of activity and positive feedback from other users can also function as a signal of quality and authority, as well as implicit call to actions; “I loved this post so much I Tweeted about it” subtly says “and you should too” to readers.

• Comments: Once a post has a couple of comments on it, display the number of comments in a visible location.
• Social Media Reactions: Using a plugin like Disqus allows you to display comments about a piece of content left in places other than the blog itself.
• Subscribers: Any blog that is using Feedburner can include a small graphic that shows the number of users subscribed. If that number is high (above a few thousand), consider including it in the theme.
• Number of ReTweets: The TweetMeme plugin makes it very easy to display the number of times a piece of content has been ReTweeted.
• Testimonials: Readers, users or customers might have said nice things about your site (either in email or on a social site); ask them for permission, and then feature their feedback on your site.

Authority

Nobody wants to be the one who told all their friends about something, only to have it turn out to be a hoax, so communicating a sense of authority is a key task for a designer interested in stimulating viral content sharing. In his work on applied memetics, Francis Heylighen specifically mentions authority as a required criteria for an idea to spread, saying:

…hosts or vehicles that are held in high regard or considered to represent expertise in the domain, will be more easily noticed and accepted

• Custom Design: One of the most obvious signals of a low-authority site is a commonly reused theme. Don’t use default templates; invest in designing a look and feel that is unique to your site and communicates your brand well.
• Professionalism: Your design can convey a level of professionalism through sophisticated use of fonts (only one or two at most), whitespace, grid layouts and mature color schemes. Don’t use too many animated gifs and don’t have auto-play music. Avoid “MySpace-esque” design.

Easy-to-Scan

Huge blocks of shapeless text are daunting, boring and unlikely to be spread. Social media users have demonstrated a well-known preference for content that has the feeling of chunked, easy-to-scan information.

• Chunking: Make sure your designs allow long blocks of text to be broken into short, scannable chunks. Focus on “top ten list” types of content.

Viral Calls to Action

Most successful contagious ideas contain some element of evangelism, where the meme itself contains instructions to spread it. On Twitter, including the phrase “please ReTweet” dramatically increases the likelihood that you’ll get ReTweeted. Most religions teach followers of the need to convert non-believers, and most chain letters explicitly ask recievers to send them on.

• Social Media Buttons: The easiest viral calls to action are buttons or badges from various social media sites, including Digg, Reddit, Twitter (“Tweet This” buttons) and Facebook. Place these buttons in as many prominent locations as you can.
• Triggers and Motivations: My viral content sharing survey uncovered a handful of motivations that can be used to persuade users to share your content. Include these triggers near your calls to action.

Novelty

People don’t spread content they’ve seen or heard a million times before. For an idea to be contagious, it has to be new in some way. In fact, my research has shown that ReTweets contain more uncommon words than regular Tweets do.

• Uniqueness: As noted in the section above about authority, your designs should stand out from the pack. Don’t make your site look like the default WordPress template, and replace the default Drupal favicon.

Stickiness

Once you’ve started to get traffic to a site from your viral efforts, you’ll want to convince visitors to stick around. Users of social media sites are the most prolific content sharers, so you should especially concentrate on getting new users from social sites engaged and committed.

• Subscriptions: Feature your RSS and email subscription options everywhere you can, and as prominently as makes sense in your design.
• Twitter: Direct as many of your readers as you can to follow you on Twitter. This includes links in your sidebar, as well as at the end of each piece of content.
• First Time Visitors: Consider using a plugin like WWSGD to show a special message just to new site visitors that encourages them to subscribe or follow you. This way, you can really drive the point home with new users, but avoid annoying your repeat readers.

Download @DanZarrella's Readability Analyzer Plugin for Wordpress Here

Download the Science of ReTweets Report here.

Don't forget to follow me on Twitter

After putting together the most recent version of my “Science of ReTweets” presentation and putting it up on Slideshare, I got a lot of great feedback, including that it’s a little hard to understand without my explanations along with each slide.

So I pulled all the data together (including some I’ve never published on this blog) with the basic transcript of the talk I give for each slide into one 22 page PDF. That report has already been featured on Fast Company and if you want to get a copy of it, all you have to do is subscribe to my blog, either by RSS or email:

Once you’ve subscribed, you’ll see a link at the end of each post (including this one) that you can click to download the report.

And if you liked this, don’t forget to buy my book.

Download @DanZarrella's Readability Analyzer Plugin for Wordpress Here

Download the Science of ReTweets Report here.

Don't forget to follow me on Twitter

Jokes, despite their popularity and widespread sharing across the Internet, are not a new concept. From a very young age we learn the setup of a joke, and very quickly catch on to the pattern of joke telling: someone shares a joke, I find it funny, and days later retell the joke to a group of friends, family or coworkers. Maybe some time later one of them will tell it at a party and the chain goes on. Jokes can play an integral role in socializing; in fact, certain people seem like nothing more than joke perpetuation machines and would be lost without their repeatable nature.

How do they work? Why do we spread them on? And how can I engineer more infectious jokes?

Incongruity-Relief

Two fish in a tank.
One turns to the other and says: “Do you know how to drive this?”

The human experience is full of cognitive dissonance and disconnects; incidents where our perception and our reality clash. Evolutionarily, these episodes can be scary at best, and deadly at worst. If you’re not expecting a certain type of berry to be poisonous and you go out and forage them for dinner, perception and reality can very quickly clash in a toxic fashion. Our ancestors lived in constant fear of being the last to know some vital piece of information, and it is scarcity that makes knowledge valuable and contagious; you’re not doing your tribal duty if you don’t tell everyone which berries will kill you.

Urban legends demonstrate a similar trait called delayed orientation. The protagonist is operating under commonly held assumptions: her perception of the scratching on the roof of her boyfriend’s car on that darkened lovers’ lane tells her not to go check it out. In the morning, it turns out it was her boyfriend, hung upside down by the serial killer and she could have saved him–if only that information wasn’t so scarce.

Perception colliding with reality causes goosebumps. And we love sharing goosebumps–they’re contagious.

Jokes address that tension and resolve it in a nonthreatening manner. Remember that swine flu joke graphic with the little kid licking the pig’s nose? Catharsis. See the 1963 Tanzanian contagious laughter outbreak as another example.

A patient says: “Doctor, last night I made a Freudian slip, I was having dinner with my mother-in-law and wanted to say: “Could you please pass the butter.” But instead I said: “You silly cow, you have completely ruined my life.”

If you want to mastermind your own humor pandemic, play on existing incongruities.

Joke Cycles

A joke cycle is a collection of jokes that revolve around a single event, idea or person. They tend to start quickly, in memetic waves, and die unfunny deaths just as soon as they began. Cycle-based jokes often recycle old structures with the new topic; how many times have we heard the same joke, just different names? Cycles commonly address topics of great societal unease like swine flu, celebrity deaths, and the Challenger disaster; they’re like catharsis epidemics.

In 1993′s Healing with Humor, Dr Arthur Asa Berge says “whenever there is a popular joke cycle, there generally is some widespread kind of social and cultural anxiety, lingering below the surface, that the joke cycle helps people deal with.”

In your humor laboratory, base your jokes on those moments of cultural tension.

Memory

Before you can retell a joke, you must be able to remember it. Specific details in a joke can help create a mental image of the scene, aiding in recall. However, these minutiae are easy to lose or mutate between tellings–successful jokes don’t depend on fine-grain elements, they are enhanced by them.

The unexpectedness that makes a joke funny can also make it hard to recall, as the human mind finds it easier to store information types we’ve dealt with before. This is why the most clichéd jokes are often the easiest to remember. Contagious and funny jokes frequently make use of a new-old model, where either new content is shoehorned into an old structure, or a old content is reworked into a new structure.

Why did the chicken cross the road?

DR. SEUSS: Did the chicken cross the road? Did he cross it with a toad? Yes, The chicken crossed the road, But why it crossed, I’ve not been told!

KARL MARX: It was an historical inevitability.

BILL CLINTON: I did not cross the road with THAT chicken. What do you mean by chicken? Could you define chicken, please?

ERNEST HEMINGWAY: To die. In the rain. Alone.

State-dependent memory and sensorial triggers can also aid the recall process. Some people have a joke they tell every single time they’re drunk. And some people have jokes they tell every time someone says a certain word or phrase.

Make sure your viral joke is easy to remember.

Social Setting

I always look for a woman who has a tattoo. I see a woman with a tattoo, and I’m thinking, okay, here’s a gal who’s capable of making a decision she’ll regret in the future.

What’s the first thing you do before telling a joke? You look around you. Once you remember a joke, the social setting you find yourself decides if you will tell it. Off-color jokes are the most obvious example, but there are other, more subtle variations exist. People in “high-culture” environments often refrain from telling jokes at all, preferring witty retorts to canned material. Gender often plays a roll as in the stereotype of “ladies who don’t tell jokes and sluts who laugh at dirty jokes.”

Be aware of your target demographics’ social considerations when constructing quips.

Experiment

Twitter is the perfect petri dish to test out your jokes. Throw a few ideas against the wall and see which are ReTweeted.

If you liked this post, check out the rest of the ProtoViral Posts.

Download @DanZarrella's Readability Analyzer Plugin for Wordpress Here

Download the Science of ReTweets Report here.

Don't forget to follow me on Twitter

I’ve been working on a variety of tools that use my ReTweet Mapper as a foundation, like The ReTweetability Index. But the coolest one of them all will be ReTweet.net.

I’ve had most of this code written for quite a while, but I’ve been too busy to finish it enough to release it. So I pulled out some of the basic functionality and made a little teaser version just to see what everyone thinks about it.

This version of the tool allows you to enter the URL of a page or blog post you’d like to have ReTweeted and receive suggestions of highly ReTweetable related words to add to your content and use when Tweeting said content.

The full version will show you those users who are the most ReTweetable when it comes to content related to yours. It will also allow you to schedule Tweets to be posted during the most ReTweetable times and days, as well as “seeding” your content via DM to those ReTweetable users who have given you permission to DM them. Once your Tweet goes out, the system tracks ReTweets and clicks it gets, thereby allowing you to test and refine your content further.

So go check it out and let me know what you think.

Download @DanZarrella's Readability Analyzer Plugin for Wordpress Here

Download the Science of ReTweets Report here.

Don't forget to follow me on Twitter

I tend to look at social and viral marketing on a campaign level, evaluating viral marketing campaigns as a whole instead of individual components. For me, viral marketing science is all about figuring out what and how things spread, as opposed to the more general “how communities interact online,” and so the science comes in when various elements are interacting with each other and with the audience.

It is important to note that this does not mean that viral marketing is purely tactical; on the contrary, there is a great deal of strategy present in how these campaigns fit into a brand’s overall marketing mix. The science is in hitting the sweet spot between viral tactical elements and overarching marketing strategy.

The fields I draw from commonly include sociology, neurology, statistics, history, psychology (especially of the evolutionary type), economics, biology and memetics. I also use metaphors, terms and models from epidemiology as tools to help communicate about viral marketing, as these are much more commonly understood.

I see much of the information currently available about social and viral marketing as being comprised of two distinct types: conjecture-driven and data-driven. The former is the majority, a formulation of advice based on anecdotal evidence and “what seems right.” My work with multivariate testing, combined with research from The Tipping Point and Freakonomics, has shown me that the actual data often disproves the conclusions drawn purely from gut-feelings. My efforts have focused on creating content that is backed by facts, not feelings, and falls into the data-driven bucket. I call it viral marketing science.

The first thing that got me thinking about the potential power of scientific viral marketing was, surprisingly, a work of fiction: Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. In it, the villain creates a biolingusitic virus based on a prototypical, brain-stem related Sumerian language. He uses the virus to basically enslave a whole bunch of people in a world domination plot.

I also believe that there is plenty of room for art in viral marketing; the creativity, intuition and improvisation involved in a successful campaign often come from a deep understanding of the data involved. But the brute creative genius most people assume is the core of contagious campaigns can make the entire exercise seem like black magic and entirely unpredictable. However, using scientific methods, it is possible for mere mortals to create repeatably viral campaigns.

Download @DanZarrella's Readability Analyzer Plugin for Wordpress Here

Download the Science of ReTweets Report here.

Don't forget to follow me on Twitter

Alex Bogusky is co-chairman of Crispin Porter + Bogusky, or CP+B as those in the know like to say, a large advertising agency best known for edge-pushing viral marketing. As such, they’re also one of the few ad agencies whose work I admire. CP+B has won a slew of awards; they were recently named Creativity’s Agency of the Year and have collected a handful of One Club Pencils in just a few years.

After a short stint on Twitter, Alex publicly quit the micro-blogging service, saying it “wasn’t for him.” Intrigued by his thoughts on ReTweeting, I asked him to do an email interview.

Dan Zarrella: I’m a huge fan of the viral work CP+B has done, especially for Burger King (most famously the Subservient Chicken and most recently the Whopper Sacrifice). You guys seem to be using new mediums and platforms to build these campaigns. Have you used Twitter like this yet, or do you have any plans to?

Alex Bogusky: That’s really kind of you to say. We just love interacting with consumers instead of talking at them. We love the back and forth. We’re playing around a little bit with the Old Navy Supermannequins. Just getting going but it should get interesting soon.

DZ: Do you think Twitter has reached a critical mass yet where big brands are well served by engaging the audience there?

AB: I don’t know the raw numbers for twitter but there are certainly some big wins to be had. But we can’t really look at any social media in isolation because they’re all bouncing off one another and influencing each other in real time.

DZ: To me ReTweeting is an incredibly open and powerful viral messaging mechanism. Do you think ReTweeting is going to be an important tactic for viral marketing in the future?

AB: It could be. It’s certainly faster at garnering more eyeballs than e-mail, IM or chat. The question will be does it amplify or simply speed up the process. Right now we have no way of knowing because it hasn’t got the adoption yet.

DZ: You and Chris Anderson (among others) have recently expressed concern with the carefree and often intent-changing way in which the tweets you post are ReTweeted. My understand is that the core problem is that if someone else ReTweets your content, but rewrites it, it may appear that you’ve said something you haven’t. Is this a big enough problem to make you weary of ReTweeting as a marketing form?

AB: This is my personal issue with retweeting and it makes me personally uncomfortable. As a marketer I don’t see it as a concern. You want people to put their stamp on marketing even if it seems negative. Consumers play rough and you have to let them play. But as a consumer I would be concerned that somebody can appear to be putting your thoughts forward but in fact they have changed them. Maybe even reversed them. It seems like it would benefit the service to somehow lock the original message if it is presented as a RT.

DZ: What do you think is the most exciting and/or important thing about Twitter for viral marketing going forward? (Is there anything exciting or important?)

AB: I don’t like to approach new media as a marketer. I prefer to approach it as a consumer and that appreciation is more likely to inspire thinking that might help our clients. Like any new media there will be significant resistance to marketing/advertising. That was a huge them with Subservient Chicken. It was actually the first hyper successful marketing foray into the web and it pissed a lot of people off. We can expect some of the same here. Twitter will also put off integrating marketing into the service for as long as possible to get the raw numbers up and the behavior fully adopted. But at some point to monetize they will probably look to advertisers. So I think we can expect the tools that marketer have at their disposal to increase in the same way it did with Google. It may all be fairly invisible to the user ala adwords but the ability to monitor and jump into real time conversations will have tremendous appeal. I’m a little skeptical of its actual value or to put it more accurately I think this opportunity will be overvalued in the beginning in much the same way banners were overvalued in the beginning and then saw that value plummet. But I’m not a futurist. Specifically because I’ve been around long enough now to see that most predictions don’t pan out. What I like about twitter is what’s happening right now and what will be happening in the next fifteen minutes. It’s extremely exciting.

Download @DanZarrella's Readability Analyzer Plugin for Wordpress Here

Download the Science of ReTweets Report here.

Don't forget to follow me on Twitter

Now that my ReTweet mapping system is functioning, I’m able to start compiling more granular data on the actual dynamics of the spread of ReTweet streams.

First, I’ll start with some simple averages. For the first 3 numbers –depth, users and Tweets, I’m looking at entire ReTweet streams, that is the whole tree, starting with the original Tweet and all of the subsequent ReTweets. What we see here is that the large majority of ReTweet streams only contain 2 levels of depth, that is ReTweets of the initial Tweet do not themselves produce further ReTweets. They also tend to only include two participating users (the original Tweeter and the ReTweeter) and two individual Tweets. From this, we begin to understand that most RT streams are merely one user ReTweeting another, and never go any further.

Averages

The next data point I’m looking at is the ReTweets per Follower (RTpF) ratio for the users involved in streams I’ve indexed (just under 20,000 users). The graph below shows the distribution of RTpF in the top 9000 most followed users in my database, I’ve graphed the actual distribution line in blue, with a 30-point moving average over it in black.

Here we see that while most users had an RTpF of under 1% in my dataset, some users showed much larger ratios, possibly indicating that there are a class of users who are more “ReTweetable” than others. In the future, as I have more data indexed, I plan to release a list of those users with the highest RTpF ratios.

To explore the followers to ReTweet issue a bit more, I then analyzed correlations between followers and stream depth and total Tweets. I used two follower numbers, the first is the number of followers the “root” level of the stream had, that is how many people were potentially exposed to the “seed” Tweet. The second follower number is the combined total of followers of every user who participated in each stream.

While we must remain cautious not to assume a causal relationship between these numbers, it does become clear that there is no significant correlation between either follower number and the depth of a stream. There is on the other hand a significant, though weak, positive correlation between the number of users exposed to a Tweet and the number of times it was ReTweeted. What this (and the distribution graph above) tells me is that while users who have more followers get ReTweeted more often, the number of followers plays a less-than-expected role in predicting how widely something is ReTweeted. I expect to find that the actual content of Tweets explains more of its “ReTweetability”.

Correlations

The last data point I looked at in this stage of research are average reproduction rates, that is how many ReTweets in turn triggered further ReTweeting. This is comparable to the biological Reproduction rate (R0) concept in that it represents the average number of additional infections a single case of infection results in.

Of those streams with 2 or more levels, only 7.57% eventually gain an additional level, yet, of those streams with 3 or more levels, nearly 11.5% grow another level. This trend continues out to the 5th level (I did index some streams with more than 5 levels, but not enough to generate any significant data). The more levels a ReTweet stream has, the more it is likely to accumulate.

What this may indicate is that social proof (or imitation more specifically) plays a role in a user’s decision to ReTweet. The more users a Twitterer sees ReTweet something, the more likely they are themselves to ReTweet it. Another factor in the decision to ReTweet that this data point (as well as the previously noted higher occurrence rate of the “please” call-to-action) may be highlighting is that when the act ReTweeting is called to a user’s attention, they may be more likely to ReTweet.

Reproduction Rates by Depth

Look for more posts on this subject, as I’ll be developing more functionality into my ReTweet tools and I’ll also start investigating content-based correlations, that is what are the factors of the content of a Tweet that make it more or less likely to be ReTweeted.

Download @DanZarrella's Readability Analyzer Plugin for Wordpress Here

Download the Science of ReTweets Report here.

Don't forget to follow me on Twitter

I started collecting ReTweets a few weeks ago and have collected just over 84,000. I’m working on a system that will allow for mapping and analysis of ReTweet streams (sneak peak below), but in building that, I’ve already uncovered some interesting data.

Contrary to what I initially thought, “RT” is used more than 4 times more often than the full word “retweet”.

ReTweets occur at an average rate of around 258 per hour, and show a distinct increase during the work day and early evening.

Retweets contain the word please over 5 times more often than most tweets.

Retweets are generally longer than other tweets.

Almost 70% of ReTweets contain a link.

Tinyurl is overwhelmingly preferred as the URL shortener to use in ReTweets.

Let me know what other data points you’d like to see and I’ll see what I can do.

And here’s a very simple, very rough preview of the mapping tool:

Download @DanZarrella's Readability Analyzer Plugin for Wordpress Here

Download the Science of ReTweets Report here.

Don't forget to follow me on Twitter

And he asked him, What is thy name? And he answered, saying, My name is Legion: for we are many.

Mark 5:9

I use the term social & viral marketing to refer to what I do: contagious, organic marketing. But there are a myriad of other words and phrases people use to describe it.

Buzz Marketing

Buzz is a kind of discussion among people — excitement, hype, or anticipation about a product or service. Buzz refers both to the execution of the marketing tactic, and the resulting communication that is created. This term is used often by those who use the term “word of mouth marketing”.

Word of Mouth Marketing

Wikipedia says word-of-mouth marketing encompasses the other forms of marketing mentioned here, including buzz, blog, viral, grassroots, cause influencers and social media marketing. This is probably the most common term and it is used to describe any form of marketing that results in individuals talking (unpaid) to each other about a product or service.

Social Media Marketing Marketing

Social media marketing specifically refers to the usage of social media websites and platforms for marketing purposes. Social voting sites like Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon are used as well as social networks like Facebook and MySpace. Social media marketing also occurs through various social media platforms like blogging and microblogging.

Viral Marketing

This is my favorite term. It refers to the creation and “seeding” of pieces of content into social networks (not just of the online, Facebook variety) with the intent and goal that they are then passed on from person to person, without paid media.

Link Baiting

Link baiting is a term popular with search marketers and it describes a tactic of creating content designed to attract incoming links to a site, to boost its organic search rankings. The content is often controversial and can be specifically targeted to individual bloggers or communities the marketer wishes to obtain links from.

Guerrilla Marketing

Guerilla marketing is a technique whereby buzz is created through low-budget (often high-risk or legally ambiguous) public-space tactics. It typically relies on targeting people where they do not expect to be targeted, such as their morning commute, and as such contains the danger of becoming annoying.

Stealth Marketing

A form of guerrilla marketing, stealth marketing (also called undercover marketing) is a kind of astroturfing in which actors are hired to pretend to be brand or product fans and talk it up to unsuspecting people.

I’m sure I missed a few terms here, what words do you guys use to refer to this type of marketing?

Download @DanZarrella's Readability Analyzer Plugin for Wordpress Here

Download the Science of ReTweets Report here.

Don't forget to follow me on Twitter

You have a Twitter account, and you’re following some people. Some of those people are now following you back and you’re thinking “great, now what?” Or maybe you saw my Viral Tweet Test and are wondering how to accomplish the same effect for your content.

In my Viral Content Sharing Survey I uncovered a bunch of information that could prove useful to you if you’re trying to go viral via Twitter.

First, understand that as gregarious early-adopters Twitter users a very infectious vector to seed your viral content into. Twitter users tend to share content more often and with more people that the average user (in both one-to-one and especially in one-to-many ways). This means that it’s probably a good idea to Tweet your new content, and include “Tweet this” buttons to make sharing easier.

Next we can look at where Twitter users tend to share content from. Here we see that they prefer spreading content from blogs and social news sites (rather than mainstream news, a favorite of non-Twitter users). If you want your content to go viral, don’t do a press release or use a PR agency; post it to your blog and get it submitted to a social news site.

Lastly, determine what kind of content they like to share most often. The data says that compared to non-Twitter users (who share mostly humor) Twitter users prefer sharing news, opinion and even instructional content.

For data on more user profiles, check out the rest of my Viral Content Sharing Survey.

Download @DanZarrella's Readability Analyzer Plugin for Wordpress Here

Download the Science of ReTweets Report here.

Don't forget to follow me on Twitter

Over the past year or so I’ve been doing research into the why and how of web content “going viral,” from my Link Attraction Factors report (with the accompanying tools, API, and plugin) to my Viral Content Sharing Survey report. I’ve also taken this behavioral data and distilled it into more actionable items like a viral marketing checklist, viral seeding requirements, and of course the 10 symptoms of highly viral WordPress themes.

Out of this research has grown my latest project, the ProtoViral WordPress theme. Built to be flexible design-wise, it allows you to customize it to match the look and feel you need, while including a wide range of flexible and powerful viral marketing features built right into the theme. I’ve rolled a bunch of functionality that previously existed only in plugins into widgets and ProtoViral’s configuration panel, making them easier to control and integrate into your design.

ProtoViral is still in development, but some of the features so far include:

• Referrer-based Content Filters (show special content to visitors from specific sites)
• Easy to turn-off Ad space
• Customizable and Widgetized social voting buttons that can appear in a variety of places
• A Tweet-this button that automatically creates shortened URLs when you publish posts
• Pre- and post- entry call outs (invite readers to subscribe to your feed or follow you on Twitter
• Funnel links (direct traffic from every page on your site to a specified post)

Here’s a screenshot of some of the functionality on the configuration panel:

And here’s the voting widget configuration:

I’ve been putting the theme through its paces on a new site I launched last week called GreenOverrun and so far it seems to be doing pretty well, with 13,153 visits to its 3 posts since it launched 10 days ago.

If you’d like to test it out or give me suggestions on additional functionality (I’ve been surprised the entire time by how much you can do with a WordPress theme and have a whole new appreciation for WP now, so don’t hold back on pipe-dream ideas), let me know in the comments below.

Download @DanZarrella's Readability Analyzer Plugin for Wordpress Here

Download the Science of ReTweets Report here.

Don't forget to follow me on Twitter

In man’s brain the impressions from outside are not merely registered; they produce concepts and ideas. They are the imprint of the external world upon the human brain.

-Victor Frederick Weisskopf

The premotor cortex is a part of the frontal lobe of your brain. It is responsible for mental planning of movement and sensory guidance of motion. When you hook up a test subject to a brain scanning machine (like an fMRI, EEG, or TMS system) you’ll see this region of the brain activates when the subject performs some sort of action.

Scientists (including Giacomo Rizzolatti) studying monkeys in the 80′s and 90′s found that a percentage of the neurons in that premotor cortex also lit up when the monkeys watched another monkey or a person perform a task. The scientists called these cells mirror neurons, and evidence has been found since that indicates that humans also have these empathic neurons, and they don’t reflect motion only, they’ve been found to mirror other frontal lobe functions like sensations and emotions.

These discoveries give some credence to the emphasis Susan Blackmore places on the evolutionary importance of the human mind’s ability to imitate. In her book Meme Machine, she postulates that our uncanny skill for imitation is what allows us to transmit memes.

The thesis of this book is that what makes us different is our ability to imitate…

The concept of mirror neurons also puts a neuro-scientific framework around the socio-evolutionary theories of Informational Cascades. The selection pressures in favor of imitation may now be seen as having influenced the development of specialized mental hardware for copying others.

A 1980 paper by John Conlisk titled “Costly Optimizers and Cheap Imitators” showed that “imitators may have as high a long-run ‘fitness’ as optimizers“, and in 1992 Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd published a report called “Cultural Inheritance and Evolutionary Ecology” where they showed that in many instances social learning (like imitating your peers) is preferred by natural selection.

In applying this knowledge to viral marketing and social media, we must remember that at their most simple level, idea viruses are nothing more than bits of mental source code that say “Copy Me!” And the rapid spread of the Viral Tweet Test shows us that, to some degree, merely self-replicating memes are viable.

And while I don’t have an EEG setup to start researching with (yet, the Emotiv headset is scheduled to ship around Christmas), from a functional point of view, the act of spreading a meme or virus or piece of content to your friends (after the initial “seeds” spread it) is an imitative one. Someone sends you an email forward, and you turn around and do the same thing.

What this means for marketers is that one of the best viral “calls to action” is to allow the reader to see other people doing what you want them to do. Social proof is a sort of indirect or implied version of this. It may also indicate that we should seed our campaigns in ways that reflect how we want them to spread. Looking to “go viral” via email? Start an email forward and include all those headers (yeah, yeah, I know, this was pretty obvious already).

I think the real value in understanding mirror neurons is the potential for future testing and research. Using brain scanning (like that Emotiv EEG headset) we will be able to test the process of social media and content sharing to see if these regions of the brain are being used and optimize our messages to activate these imitative brain cells.

Download @DanZarrella's Readability Analyzer Plugin for Wordpress Here

Download the Science of ReTweets Report here.

Don't forget to follow me on Twitter

In 2007 the Washington Post conducted an experiment. They had one of the best musicians in the world to play one of the most expensive instruments in the world (a $3.5 million Stradivarius violin) on a subway platform during morning rush hour. Most people simply ignored him, “the final haul for his 43 minutes of playing was $32.17. Yes, some people gave pennies.”

There were no tuxedos or playbills or expensive tickets. No sold out concert halls or rave reviews from jaded critics. Just some of the best music in the world, but without the social cues to the quality of the performance, nobody noticed.

So even if you’re the best writer in the world, writing on a world-class web platform, with a groundbreaking design, without social proof, you’ll be very lonely.

Social proof is the idea that people rely on the reaction of others to make decisions, and we assume that others (individuals and especially groups) know more about the choice than we do. When social proofs start to accumulate you have an informational cascade. In a post a while back, I explained Information Cascading as such:

Suppose there are two restaurants and a group of people on the street outside deciding which one to eat at. The most well-informed individuals (those with higher precision in making these types of decisions) will decide first and everyone will see some people start to line up outside of one restaurant. If the others know this person is of higher precision (and even if they don’t) a few people will follow their lead and join the line. Each new person who lines up outside of the restaurant sends a signal to the rest of the group (and in particular their friends and family) that this is the restaurant to pick. The more people who follow the signal, the stronger it gets and you have an Informational Cascade.

When I studied email chain letters I wrote that

Every time someone forwards one to his or her address book, another list of recipients and senders is attached to it, creating essentially a list of people who implicitly give authority to the message.
…
Even if you may think an email is a hoax, who are you to think that you know better than hundreds of your peers?

Examples of this effect are numerous, from voting to investing to fashion and music– we notice, trust, and share things more when we notice that others did before us.

When I asked on Twitter what factors influence perception of a blogs “authority.” The two overwhelmingly central answers were subscriber and comment counts. Social Proof.

When people first visit a blog these two details matter as much (if not more) than professional and clean looking design and good content, spelling and grammar in an evaluation of that blog’s authority. And I’ve found from my study of applied memetics, email chain letters, and viral seeding that authority and trust are crucial factors in deciding whether or not to pass on a piece of content. The bottom line is that you must leverage social proof to establish an air of authority if you want to “go viral.”

There are a number of ways to leverage your blog readers into greater social proof indicators:

• Prominently display your Feedburner count.
• Use the “Recent Comments” widget.
• Display the number of comments for each post.

Of course for any of these tactics to work, you’ll need to have sufficiently impressive numbers, so work to increase those two metrics. Don’t forget to promote your RSS feed (I really like the WWSGD plugin for that) and end every post with a question or request for comments.

And of course to take my own advice, what do you guys think? Do subscriber and comment numbers matter to you? What is your favorite way of leveraging your visitors into social proof?

Download @DanZarrella's Readability Analyzer Plugin for Wordpress Here

Download the Science of ReTweets Report here.

Don't forget to follow me on Twitter

Blogs are my favorite CMS for “going viral.” Cheap, easy, expandable, everything you could want. But when you’re launching a blog and your goal is going to be lots of social media and viral traffic, you’ll need to make sure you pick the right theme. Here are a list of 10 things your theme must have to “go viral.”

1. Social Buttons

Most blogs these days have the sociable plugin, so that there is a list of social sites at the bottom of every post that allow readers to submit and vote on the post. For real traction, you need to do better than these teeny little buttons. Put big, honkin’ voting buttons on every post on your site. For instance, I really like what Brent Csutoras does on his blog.

2. Images and Video

Experienced social media marketers will tell you that you should always add images and if you can, video to a post to help it do better on social voting sites. So you should make sure that your theme’s central content area is wide enough to handle high-quality images and embedded videos. I would typically recommend at least 500px wide.

3. Lightweight

If your post does start to go viral, you’ll be getting hit (hopefully) with a server-crushing load of traffic, often in a very short period of time. So beyond being on a good host and using a caching-system, you should also work to ensure that your entire theme is lightweight. Optimize and reduce your images, cut down on HTML bloat (no tables, please) and strip down your javascript. Not only will your server thank you, but your visitors (especially those from social news sites) will appreciate the faster, cleaner theme.

4. Low-Advertising

I would recommend ideally, not to put any advertising on your site if your goal is to go viral and do well in social media, but that’s not always feasible (or profitable). So if you absolutely must include ads, keep them away from the top of your content and ensure that they blend in well with your site and are, above all, relevant. A good blog theme should include advertising areas under each post and lower-down in the sidebar.

5. Urgency

My research has shown that timely content, like news, tends to get shared more frequently than humor, opinion and other non-timely categories. So your blog theme should emphasize the date and maybe even the time that you posted.

6. Authority

To go viral you’ll need for your content to be trusted on some level. So your theme should induce a feeling of authority. Don’t use extremely common (or default) themes as these will make your blog look fly-by-night. Make sure to include an about page, any awards or recognition the blog (or author) has received, and perhaps a photo of the author. Tell the visitor why he or she should invest them time in this blog and trust what it has to say.

7. Built-In Viral Calls-to-Action

The sociable plugin allows for a line of text, a viral call to action, generally something like: “if you like this, please share.” For real infectiousness, I say take it a step further and include a call to action in theme of your blog on every post page. Try hitting on some of the viral triggers my survey outlined and give readers easy suggestions on how (or who) to share the content.

8. Piggybacking & Funneling

The concept of piggybacking is something I think (and talk) about a lot. The idea is that if your content becomes popular with a group of savvy users on one site, you can often count on those users being members of other, similar sites. This way you can leverage one traffic stream into more streams. Funneling is something that I read about a little while back. The concepts are similar and can be exploited by a good blog theme. Make sure than posts link to other, similar posts. Your theme should include something like “if you liked this post, check out these too.”

9. Emphasize Comments

On a blog, in a viral context, comments function as social proof (making it obvious that other people are also interested in this post) and as an incitement to respond and keep the conversation going. So your theme should include an area to highlight recent comments in the sidebar, as well as the number of comments on each post. You may also want to look at improving your comment section, with gravatars or a reputation system for frequent commenters.

10. Stickiness

Those people who come to your site as a result of it “going viral” or becoming popular on a social news site, are the type or are most likely to be able to make it do that again. So keep them around. Your theme should highlight your feeds, subscriptions, Twitter account and your various social media profiles. You want these savvy and contagious users to become frequent users.

Download @DanZarrella's Readability Analyzer Plugin for Wordpress Here

Download the Science of ReTweets Report here.

Don't forget to follow me on Twitter

I’ve spent the last year or so doing research into the history, sociology, statistics, psychology and mathematics of information sharing (many of the posts I’ve done about this stuff are over in my sidebar under “Protoviral”). I’ve found a number of reccuring elements across areas of study, so here are some of the bits I’ve learned that you can apply to almost any blog post to make it more viral.

1. Ask for the Share

This can kind of sound cheesy, but believe me it works. Respondents to my Sharing Survey reported a bunch of triggers you can pull to convince people to spread your content including utility (share this with your friends who might find it useful) and “they-might-miss-it” (show this to you friends who may not see it otherwise).

2. Fill an Information Vaccum

In my research on rumors, I found that scientists working on weaponizing rumors during WW2 noticed:

… that good rumors are “provoked by” and provide interpretation or elaboration on a current event, filling a “knowledge gap.” If the locals heard a big boom earlier in the day, a rumor could easily be constructed to explain it if the authorities did not.

3. Allow Remixing

Give your readers something to play with, remix or customize. The study of urban legends uncovers a concept called “communal recreation:

Historically urban legends were passed on from person to person in what amounted to a giant game of telephone with each person changing the story a little bit as they passed it on. Each person in this recreative chain attempts to fit the story into their existing mental frameworks and in doing so they apply a bit of themselves, of their own values and perspectives, altering the story and retelling their version. Often the first person in a new society to effect this change to an urban legend makes the legend more intuitive for the rest of the group because he or she has imposed their shared values on to it already.

4. Optimize for Social Media

Make sure that you have all the requisite buttons and widgets prominently available on your post. This is important for leveraging streams of traffic from one site into popularity on other sites. Lots of users of one social voting site are users of other sites, so if you start getting traffic from one, put a voting button under their mouse.

5. Provoke Discussion

You can be controversial, contrarian, outrageous, slightly disagreeable, or just a tad-too-opinionated. The point is to make people want to respond to you and to see how their friend’s respond. Respondents to my sharing survey said that they often shared content in both one-to-one and one-to-many ways because they wanted to start conversations and get feedback.

6. Teach

Utility was another common motivator I found in my survey. Make your content valuable so that when your readers share it, they’re engaging in a social exchange with their friends as happens with proverbs. A little while back I said this about the concept:

Its all about useful information, words you can use to do stuff. Like the old saying goes, everyone has an opinion, but not everyone can teach you to do something. Content is dead and resource is king.

7. Combine Relevances

Every individual has seemingly distinct interests. I’m into zombies and marketing, so if you wrote a blog post about marketing to zombies my friends would most likely send it to me. This tactic is a way to satiate the most common individual sharing motivation I found in my survey, “personal relevance”.

On the individual sharing side, the most common (40% of responses) motivation I identified was “personal relevance.” These answers typically said something like “I saw something and it made me think of one of my friends,” or “It seemed right up my friend’s alley.”

8. Seed it

Some of the people you know, or the communities you’re involved with will be more interested than others in your post for topical reasons. And a subset of these people are more prolific sharers than the rest (usually the most savvy early adopters). So make sure your content gets into a place where these people will see it as soon as you launch it. Twitter is a great place to do this.

9. Assist Organic Spread

Use a real-time analytics system (like Clicky’s Spy -aff link) to watch where traffic is coming to your post from. If you notice that a new social media site is driving traffic to your post, add that button to the top of it and maybe send the link out on Twitter.

Download @DanZarrella's Readability Analyzer Plugin for Wordpress Here

Download the Science of ReTweets Report here.

Don't forget to follow me on Twitter

          

Viral Marketing is a tricky thing, and like fire and government it is powerful servant but a fearful master. While companies scramble to “go viral” and produce the next overnight web sensation, the road is fraught with danger and the gutter littered with epic fails, here are 9 of my favorite examples of viral marketing failure (with one bonus at the end).

Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theater

The most famous (and ridiculous) recent example of viral marketing FAILs is the Great Boston Bomb Scare of 2007 ™. In an attempt to create hype around its upcoming movie, advertisers behind Aqua Teen Hunger Force paid some weird dudes to hang sticky LED signs all over the city. The city freaked out, thinking they were bombs and shut everything down, arrested the kids and fined Cartoon Network a whole bunch of money. But at least now it has its own Wikipedia page.

Ashanti Death Threats

Failing R&B singer Ashanti thought it would be a good idea to promote her new album by launching a viral marketing campaign that allowed people to sent their friends death threats. Yes you read that right, death threats. Amazing idea really.

Read more here.

Chevy’s Create Your Own Tahoe Commercial

Chevy created a user generated advertising platform for a campaign for the Tahoe. Things went wrong when users started making ads critical of the big car maker’s fuel efficiency and environmental friendliness. Commercials typically included stuff like this:

Hey, 2,325 U.S. kids have died, 16,653 have been injured, and up to $2 trillion will be spent to keep our oil supply safe. If you support the troops you’ll get out there and use some of it! Chevy Tahoe: Don’t let all that blood go to waste.™

You can read more about it here.

Virgin’s B3ta Competition

Virgin started a contest on the popular designer website for users to create images of what would happen if you said yes to everything. What Virgin ended up getting was a bunch of offensive pictures of Richard Branson. The guys behind the site had this to say about it all:

“Yep, they pulled the challenge. Yep, they were told before they opened it exactly how it would play out. Yep, they asked us to delete it. Yep, I think the whole thing is funny.”

Read more about this failure here.

Starbucks Free Iced Coffee

Sometimes the campaign doesn’t have to fail to turn against its creators, sometimes it just has to work too well, like Starbuck’s free iced coffee for friends and family efforts. The coffee chain sought to entice friends and family of employees to come into the store for free iced coffee, but when word got out about the offer and the respones was bigger than expected, corporate headquarters nixed the promotion. Details on this one here.

Dove & Axe Mashup

Unilever’s success with socially responsible Dove viral ads found resistance when a Youtube user made a mashup of the Dove ads and some of Unilever’s Axe commercials, which many consider sexist. Axe ads were used to show how on one hand the company objectifies women, while on the other, it pretends to care about the daughters of America.

alliwantforxmasisapsp.com

When real, authentic organic viral growth just seems too difficult, companies periodically resort to other tactics to generate online buzz about them, like Sony tried to do for its PSP. The electronics company hired an outside agency to create a fake astrotuff blog called “All I want for Christmas is a PSP” to help sell more of the hand held media devices. When they were outed they faced huge public backlash. AdAge covered the lesssons marketers should take away from this debacle.

Working Families for Wal-Mart

As if Sony’s epic fail didn’t teach the PR world enough, Walmart hired firm Edelman who created an astrotuff blog allegedly written by average working families to counteract the bad public image the mega chain has suffered from for years. When the blog was outed as a fake it further damaged Walmart (and Edelman’s) shaky reputation. Learn more about that one here.

Sarah Marshall

An attempt to market a new Judd Apatow movie led some misguided agency to post signs all over various cities proclaiming their hatred for a poor girl named Sarah Marshall. Well, it turns out, Sarah Marshalls do really exist in the real world. Oops, their B. Read about a few disgruntled Sarahs here.

What Viral Marketing Could Turn Into

Lets end on a little humor (as if there were none in the above examples).

          

Download @DanZarrella's Readability Analyzer Plugin for Wordpress Here

Download the Science of ReTweets Report here.

Don't forget to follow me on Twitter

Social and viral marketing are all about knowing your audience, especially that most infectious segment of your target that you’re considering your seed vector, and the best way to learn about them is through analytics. I’ve been thinking about analytics for viral marketing for a few days and then I saw a post on Social Media Explorer about analytics for bloggers, which sparked me to write this post. There are 3 stages of usage for analytics in the viral marketing process: research, growth and evaluation. And one sort of theoretical one: testing.

Research

When you’re planning your viral campaign, you should first focus on researching your target audience as I suggested in my checklist. This means not only understanding the demographics, preferences and behaviors of the entire group you’d like to reach but also identifying that segment of your target that shares content the most frequently and with the most people, this will be your seed vector. Typically these people are early adopters who are savvy social media users and you’ll be aiming to seed your content in a place where they’re very likely to see it.

Say you want to reach an older, more affluent female audience rather than the typically young-techy-male demographic that frequents sites like Digg. Head on over to Quantcast and look at the data on some sites like Kirtsy, Sugarloving, BlogHer, and StumbleUpon. You’ll see that of these sites, Kirtsy best matches your target audience. Quantcast also gives you some great content preference data indicating which category of sites Kirtsy users tend to like:

Fashion/Cosmetics
Parenting
Bridal
Baby
Fragrances/Cosmetics
Jewlery/Luxury Goods
Home/Family
Kids
Politics & Commentary
Travel

To expand your list of target seed sites beyond Kirtsy, you can then jump into Google’s Ad Planner and find sites with audiences that match Kirtsy’s. Here you’ll find sites like CoolMomPicks, and The Pioneer Woman. You’ll notice that for some sites (including The Pioneer Woman), Quantcast even offers links to other sites that share the same audience which you can use to further expand your seeding site list.

Now you know where to put your content so that it will be seen by the most social-media-savvy members of your target demographic and you know which types of content they prefer viewing.

Growth

Lots of sites use Google Analytics, its a great tool and unbeatable for the price, but there is a reporting delay of a few hours so it doesn’t do much good in those critical hours right after you launch your campaign. To help manage and accelerate the seeding and growth phases of your campaign, you’ll need some sort of real-time-analytics.

I use and like Clicky’s spy feature (affiliate link). Using a real-time spy like this allows you to see where your traffic is coming from, right now, so if your campaign does begin to go viral and users start reposting it and sharing it across the web, you’ll be among the first to know. If your most recent blog post started getting a little popular on Digg and you noticed in the spy that it also began drawing traffic from Mixx, you could give the story a little exposure on Mixx too (perhaps by Tweeting about it or adding a Mixx button to your post).

Real-time-analytics and acceleration like this is an important paradigm to understand in social and viral marketing. You can’t just go and shove your content everywhere they’ll take it, real growth and contagiousness is organic. It is better to carefully and effectively seed your content in a few choice places and then let the savvy and prolific audiences exposed to it in those places spread it further. When they do begin spreading it, make sure you’re there and ready to pour gas on the fire.

Evaluation

Once you see that the growth of your campaign has started to plateau or slow down, it is time to leverage your analytics for evaluation. This is the stage where you compare your metrics to the goals and KPI you set before you began the campaign. Was the goal of this to get more links to your site? Check your inbound link count. Was it to generate blogger buzz? Do some blog searches for your campaign on sites like Technorati and Google Blogsearch. Were you trying to drive traffic to your site? Look at your Google Analytics reports. Were video views your goal? Click the Statistics & Data tab on Youtube and see how well you did.

Beyond simple traffic metrics, there are some more advanced systems available that allow you to measure the number of times your content was shared, some platforms (including emails and press releases) will tell you the number of times people used the send-to-a-friend functionality. I’ve also played around with a concept idea that can measure how many times your link was sent (via any online communication method, IM, email, Facebook, etc) and viewed as well as develop a viral family tree of sorts showing which seeds led to the greatest eventual growth. I may release some version of this in the future, and I know there are similar proprietary solutions available that do almost similar things.

Testing

The more advanced tracking and family tree tracing system I mentioned above leads into a possible use for analytics in viral marketing that I have not seen actually developed yet. It is theoretically possible to develop a split or multivariate testing suite that tests content not against conversions or even engagement metrics (time on site, page views per visit) but against actual content sharing. This way we could test which words, images and designs lead to the content being shared the most and actually begin to quantify ‘virality’. Has anyone seen anything like this working in the wild yet?

Download @DanZarrella's Readability Analyzer Plugin for Wordpress Here

Download the Science of ReTweets Report here.

Don't forget to follow me on Twitter

Once you’ve decided you’d like to create a viral marketing campaign, its easy to become too focused on the details, and miss the forest for the trees, but a good campaign is the integration of a lot of parts. Here’s a quick checklist to make sure you haven’t missed anything.

Goals Have you defined your campaign’s goals? Do you know what you’re trying to do (in an actionable and quantifiable way) and have you identified the metrics you will use to identify success? Keep in mind that certain, identifiable and targetable types of users tend to be more prolific in spreading content, be sure to target these people.

Vector Research Have you identified the demographic you’d like your campaign to “go viral” in and have you researched them to know what types of content they share and where they share it from?

Uniqueness & Novelty Is your campaign truly new? It can be a new take on an old idea, but there must be some kernel of novelty present because otherwise, who cares?

Utility Is your campaign useful, or will it improve user’s lives? If people believe they are helping someone by sending your content to them, it will dramatically increase your chance of going viral.

Incentive Have you provided some way for users to receive some kind of value by spreading your content? Freebies and product samples are an easy way to accomplish this.

Stickiness Have you included the ability for users who love your campaign to become engaged in a more long-term fashion with it? Email or Feed subscriptions are the obvious ways to do this.

Call to Actions Have you included viral calls-to-action that will trigger user’s desire to spread your content (which you should have identified in the research stage)?

Optimization Have you made sure that your content is easy to share? Is the URL short and permanent? Did you include tools for users to share it on social sites? If you’re using some form of video, can users embed the video on their own sites and profiles?

Remixing Have you made sure your content can be remixed by viewers? The process of communal recreation is important to “going viral” and you should make sure your campaign is a platform for users to express themselves with it. Think about things like personalization and customization.

Conversation Does your campaign have mechanisms in place to allow viewers to talk about it (both with you and with their friends)? Comments sections are the most common way to include this.

Seeding Once you’ve created your content, do you have a strategy for seeding it among users who are likely to share it? Don’t succumb to the “if you build it, they will come” trap, you need to place your campaign in the path of your target vectors.

Tracking & Analytics Do you have analytics systems in place so that you can track the spread and growth of your campaign as well as measure its performance against your goals?

Backup Plan Viral marketing success isn’t guaranteed, so typically I recommend clients plan to launch more than one campaign. Whatever you choose to do, make sure you have a plan if your first try doesn’t “go viral.” (Glen reminded me to add this in the comments, thanks!)

Download @DanZarrella's Readability Analyzer Plugin for Wordpress Here

Download the Science of ReTweets Report here.

Don't forget to follow me on Twitter