Virality
Typology
Uzi Shmilovici:
The Eight Types of Virality
"Many entrepreneurs struggle with the question: “How can I make my product more viral?” After looking at many successful web startups, I boiled down virality to eight different tactics, or types, that are the most common. Grab a pen:
1. Inherent virality
The type of virality you’ll die for. Simply put, a person gets no value from the product unless other people use it as well. As a result, she shares the product with other people. Sharing is done via sharing mechanisms (e.g: invite your Gmail contacts) or through pure word of mouth.
Seeding, which means getting the first people on board is very hard because of Metcalf’s Law (there’s very low value for the first users of the product). However, the growth after the seeding period, usually through word of mouth, can be explosive. This is how Skype came to be what it is.
2. Collaboration virality
In this type of virality, a person will benefit from using the product individually. However, she can get additional value from collaborating with other people, so she invites them to use the product. A classic example is folder sharing on Dropbox. This works very well if the value from collaborating is high.
3. Communication virality
In this case the product is used to communicate with other people, some of which might be potential users. By “riding” this communication channel (usually email), the product is being spread. If you ever got an email sent with Constant Contact, you probably remember seeing their logo at the bottom. A more pervasive example is the “Sent from my iPhone/iPad” signature at the bottom of every email you send from your iPhone or iPad. Yes, even Apple is using viral tactics (actually, I believe BlackBerry started that with “Sent using BlackBerry”).
4. Incentivized virality
Offering an incentive to spread the word is a well-known tactic dating back to offline marketing. The incentive will usually be cash or a benefit in return of inviting other people to use the product. For instance, Gilt Group will give you a $25 credit for each person you refer. Dropbox will give extra space to both you and your invitee’s Dropbox accounts, which turned out to work very well. Personally, I’m not a big fan of the cash incentive approach as it is not very scalable but if you can make it work economically, it might be very effective.
5. Embeddable virality
This method works superbly well for content websites. The ability to take a piece of content and embed it anywhere on the web, with a link back to the original website. This will put your product in front of countless users. There’s an interesting multiplier that occurs when new people who are exposed to the content embed it on their own website, promoting it even further. This approach has worked tremendously well for Youtube and Slideshare.
6. Signature virality
Users that are using your product, either embed one of the features in their own website or refer people to a hosted page to use a specific feature. In both cases, when this feature is displayed to other people, it also includes a “powered by” signature at the bottom, which then becomes a lead generation machine. Survey products are well known for the “hosted survey” approach (SurveyMonkey probably started it). This has also worked well for helpdesk companies such as Uservoice.
7. Social virality
In this case, companies leverage existing social networks to spread the word about their product. Typically, you sign up for the product with a social network id (say your Facebook id) and then through using the product, you broadcast to your social graph the fact that you are using it. Zynga exploded on Facebook because every time you fed your goat, all your friends knew about it. Spotify’s killer integration with Facebook is another great example of that. There’s much more depth to explore on the specific mechanics of using this tactic, but if you get it right, you’ll experience tremendous growth.
You can also add Twitter and Facebook accounts on top of an existing signup and broadcast to both whenever the user performs an action. Instagram does exactly that to get more exposure for the app and it seems to work well for them.
Also, I have no idea what are the results of the CutCopy album page but I found their use of this tactic to be super interesting.
8. Pure word of mouth virality
Pure word of mouth happens when people are spreading the word about the product just because they enjoyed it, it’s free, or they think it’s cool. While this is very hard to quantify, there are two things you can do to support that kind of virality. First, build an awesome product that people really love (Evernote). Second, make it special and give people something to talk about. That’s where branding comes into play. I don’t have their numbers but I can guess that a significant part of Mailchimp’s growth is from people talking about their funny quirkiness." (http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/26/eight-ways-go-viral/)
More Information
- See our entry on the Virality Coefficient and the discussion on its cultural relativity.
- Social Network Theory
- see the book: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks