“When the number of factors coming into play in a phenomenological complex is too large scientific method in most cases fails. One need only think of the weather, in which case the prediction even for a few days ahead is impossible.” -Albert Einstein
You can’t predict viral marketing. You also can’t guarantee something will “go viral,” then again, neither can you promise organic SEO results to a client. With search marketing there are best practices and analysis methods and tools. On the other hand, viral marketing doesn’t (yet) have these sort of guidelines to produce repeatable and sustainable results.
What we can do however, is to model our viral marketing ideas and campaigns from prototypical characteristics of historically contagious content. In biological evolution, successful genes arise by way of mutation from slightly-less successful ancestors.
If you look at past campaigns that had similar content, media and/or audience to your goals, common traits would emerge. These traits can be used as guidelines for future campaigns.
The patterns emerge from the selection pressures applied by the audience and media. If your audience is all on one type of platform, that environment imposes a unique set of pressures that determine which content is successful.
Twitter is a great petri-dish for analyzing viral content like this. A Twitter environment selects for short and simple ideas and powerful calls to action, whereas an email environment selects for strong sender-receiver relationships.
On the broad topic scale represented in ReTweets, useful patterns have already emerged, the most obvious example of which is “please retweet.”
Social news sites are another great place for modeling research, in fact most good internet marketers can tell you all about what structure of content do well on Digg, delicious, reddit, etc. The same holds true for most niches of the blogosphere.
Every email you get forwarded by someone is a potential prototyping source, this is especially true if you’re getting emails from the audience you’re trying to reach. 
Social networks could be a powerful source of information, but due to privacy concerns much of it is not readily available.
An important caveat here is novelty. In most forms of viral content, the newness and uniqueness of the idea is a vital component. In many places I’ve found a New/Old (inspired by Clotaire Rapaille) structure where either new content is put into a old structure, or old content is put into a new structure. An example of the former is “trackbacks for Twitter” and an opposite example is “cat pictures with lolspeak”.
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February 27th, 2009 at 2:06 pm
I totally agree that there are certain frames or prototypes for viral marketing – certain variations of similar themes become successful – and that novelty is the huge, essential ingredient.
February 27th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
I think the prototypes can be frames/structures/media or the actual content inside the structure/media. And the “novel” stuff can be either as well.
February 28th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
This is excellent advice. Thanks for helping me think systematically about this.
I’m always skeptical when someone bills themselves as a provider of viral marketing results. The whole social media idea precludes predictable results. Whole people aren’t easily manipulated.
Thanks for reminding me to learn from others who have succeeded in spreading the word.
February 28th, 2009 at 4:15 pm
I agree that there are prototypes for viral marketing but I think that “always successful concepts” appear. Imagine a pile of equal concepts, choose one or more of them dependending on the available resources.
Novelty is valuable and rare like a diamond. How many companys could provide a framework or would establish it today?
February 28th, 2009 at 4:43 pm
This is one reason why I close all of my marketing emails with:
“If you find this valuable, please feel free to forward it to your friends!”
It works very well indeed.
Data points, Barbara
March 4th, 2009 at 2:17 pm
Good one on viral marketing Dan …Thank u.
April 2nd, 2009 at 12:37 pm
I think it all comes down to content. You could have the best marketing tool in the world; but if your content isn’t appealing, people won’t share it. @digital_paper
September 24th, 2009 at 6:35 am
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September 24th, 2009 at 1:35 pm
Hi.
I heard the glad news that the Social media marketing is becoming very popular now-a-days and it's contribution to theOnline marketing services is growing rapidly. Most of the site owner alike to campaign their site through it and also they are getting the satisfactory results….
Twitter,Flickr,LinkedIn and Face book are the bright example of it. We can't ignore the importance of the social media site for our SEO campaign.
I enjoy a lot by reading your posts… ….Keep it up….
Thanks