Twitter. MyBlogLog. MySpace. These sites all have a few things in common, but the one I’m concerned with is the ability of allowing users to link their own sites. Allowing users to link to their sites seems relatively unimportant (sometimes irrelevant) until you think about how the web has changed. Now nearly everyone has a website, and nearly everyone thinks people should go to their website. For people to get to your site, you generally need links to the site. That’s the basic rule of SEM. A smart user of a site that allows you to link to your website won’t just link to their website, they feverishly add friends to their account. The more friends they have, the more pages there are linking to their user page on the site. The more links to their user page, the more important search engines think the page is, and thus the more valuable the link back to the users own site becomes. My guess is that this easy type of linking is greatly facilitating the ability of a number of sites to “be viral.” This is just one of the numerous things one should consider when developing a social networking site (or any type of site requiring an account) and one that I’m considering as I prepare to redo and redefine how social aspects are handled on Lopico.
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Two articles I’ve seen today and one website have one thing in common - they misuse the word viral. Calling something viral before it happens is just wrong.
The examples I’ve seen today (sarcasm in italics):
- website says ‘just posted viral videos’ - hmmm…. just posted and viral? that’s amazing.
- blogger says ‘it’s a good idea to put your videos on youtube for some viral marketing’ - oh, as soon as they’re on youtube they’re viral? Awesome.
- newspaper says ‘local businesses are using MySpace for viral marketing’ - Wow, I’m on MySpace, I must be viral too. That must be why everyone is talking about the daily j.d.a.
Things aren’t viral because they’re on YouTube or Digg or because your business is on MySpace - at some point someone looked at how these services spread and how they let some things spread and said ‘that’s what viral marketing is.’ But it’s not. Viral marketing refers to the ways in which ideas spread - no service can guarantee viral marketing. You can use these things (and others including real life human interaction) to increase the chance that your idea will become viral, but things aren’t viral from the start - they have to spread first.
If you really want to know what viral marketing is, read Unleashing the idea virus - it’s free.