Tips for achieving Viral Growth

Viral growth is the potential to tap into social networks to achieve exponential business growth.

It may sound like a lot of marketing fuzz, but there is plenty of truth to it.  YouTube, Facebook, Amazon and MySpace are just some of the Web2.0 businesses that are or have achieved this sort of growth.  The same mediums are helping savvy businesses and individuals to ride their coat tails.

I've recently blogged about Social Media Optimisation, which is just one means of marketers to capitalise on viral growth and I've touched on these concepts in 10 Proven Methods to attract and measure return website visitors.

Well there actually is some science behind it.

Firstly, there is the concept of the Long Tail, first coined by Chris Anderson in 2004, in which businesses with distribution power can sell a greater volume of otherwise hard to find items at small volumes than of popular items at large volumes.  But how do you get this distribution power ?  Well one way is mindshare, and that can be achieved on the web.

Then there is Metcalfe's law, which states that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of users of the system.  Well this basically means that the Internet and the world wide web has massive value in terms of the reach of social media.

But it can also be a bit hit and miss, and unfortunately a lot of it is about fashion.  The web is basically becoming a big popularity contest.  News sites are beginning to discover that the the top stories are not earthquakes or wars, but inane and quirky things that people "Digg", like stories about Bigfoot sightings or Ben Cousins latest adventures.  The biggest tip is that noone became popular unless they try to get noticed in the first place.

To have any chance at all, you need to get in early and start applying as many tricks as you can before your competitors start doing the same.  Then you need to have plans prepared just in case the horse does indeed bolt.  Will you generate more work than you can handle ? 

We've done a heap of consulting in this area recently, and we see ourselves as pioneers in this area with our first real success stories are beginning to emerge as a result.