RAVI KUMAR

INDIAN BUSINESS ACADEMY

PGPM-08-10
 Not only are you competing with your
competitors for their eyeballs and their
loyalty, but also the information glut that fills
the Internet and everyone’s lives.

 Hear the NPR interview of David Shenk, author of “Data Smog:

Surviving the Information Glut” at
<http://www.npr.org/ramarchives/ne7a0301-6.ram>
 Interruption marketing just doesn’t work
anymore
◦ Unanticipated, impersonal, and irrelevant ads won’t
break through the data smog
 Stop marketing at people. Get out of the way
and let people market your products to each
other.
 Putting together the right offer
 Who’s going to spread your message?
 Making it easy…(email & web)
 Potential traps and hazards
 Best and worst practices
 Case studies
 Word of mouth marketing augmented by
digital communication
 Facilitate the process of people referring

their friends and colleagues

◦ to purchase your products, visit your site, sign
up for a free trial, subscribe to your newsletter,
etc.
 Traditional WOM  Digitally augmented
◦ Travels slowly WOM
◦ Dies off ◦ Spreads fast
◦ E.g. recommend a ◦ Travels far
book to some friends ◦ Exponential growth
(amplification)
◦ E.g. Hotmail
 Sneezer, ideavirus, vector, hive, tipping point,
connector, maven, promiscuous, powerful,
smooth, amplifier, persistence, word-of-
mouse, network effect, Law of the Few, Zipf’s
Law, Metcalf’s Law, compounding effect, etc.
 Gotta love buzzwords!
 Is your idea virusworthy?
 Ideaviruses love a vacuum
 Seth Godin calls them “sneezers”
◦ “Promiscuous sneezers” - have their price
◦ “Powerful sneezers” - can’t be bought; difficult
to predict what will motivate them
 Malcolm Gladwell breaks them out
differently
◦ “Connectors” - masters of the ‘loose tie,’ seem
to know everybody
◦ “Mavens” - genuinely helpful
◦ “Salespeople” - born to sell
 Go after a demographic or psychographic
group where your ‘ideavirus’ can dominate
 Like people hang out together (e.g. the

affluent mix in the same circles)

 Target those sympathetic to your cause

◦ BMW dealership - don’t target Ford owners

 Identify your top sneezers by tracking ratio of
“unique opens” for each message sent
◦ 0 = didn’t open
◦ 1 = recipient opened but didn’t forward
◦ 2+ = recipient probably forwarded (unless they
check mail from multiple PCs)
 Reward and incent these sneezers! They’re
worth their weight in gold.
 Don’t insist that a referrer’s friend become
a customer to earn the incentive. That’s
outside his/her control.
 Make sure the incentive is relevant to the
recipient.
 It doesn’t have to be expensive.
 e.g. golf balls with the recipient’s name
printed on them
 DON’T change the rules mid-campaign
 Don’t just give a speech and leave
◦ Fly in your customers to tell their stories
◦ Sponsor a cocktail party afterward
 Don’t just tell them how your product is safe
and secure; give them a first aid kit for their car
 3M Post-It Notes:
◦ Secretary of 3M’s chairman sent a free case to
secretaries of chairmen of the Fortune 500
 MCI Mail:
◦ Blew it - built friction into the system by charging
instead of giving it away to build critical mass
 Metcalf’s Law - the value of a network
increases with the square of the number of
people using it
 A world with 1000 fax machines is 250,000

times better than one with only 2

 Zipf’s Law - #1 is MUCH more popular than
#2
 Stanford study: artificially boosting bestseller

status of downloaded files

 Self fulfilling prophecy
 If you can’t dominate one, create your own
 Ask recipients to forward your e-newsletter,
email, or SMS message to friends
 Include on your site “Email this page to a

friend” buttons to refer your articles,

products, etc.
 Make it a fill-in form that allows the visitor to

pass it on to a number of people at once

◦ e.g. Ideavirus.com’s “Send It” page
 Not a blatant, in-your-face demand but an
informal invitation
 Should not smack of commercialism or spam
 e.g. a blank postcard with a funny cartoon

referencing the book and its topic

 Of the content
 Of the frequency
 Of the relationship
 Hotmail  Google
 HOTorNOT.com  SETI@home
 Quixtar  Budweiser parody
 Unleashing the  Absolut

Ideavirus  Gaming company

 Blue Mountain Arts  Etc.
 Appended a small plug to every outgoing
email: “Get Your Private, Free Email at
http://www.hotmail.com”
 Founded in 1996. By Summer 1998, had 25
million active accounts
 Signs up over 150,000 subscribers per day,
each of them profiles themselves upon
registering
 Founder (Sabeer Bhatia) sold to Microsoft for
$500 million
 Sabeer invented the term “viral marketing”
 Formerly AmIHotorNot.com
 View photos of strangers and rate their looks from
1 to 10 or post your own photo
 Launched by 2 unemployed Californians on a whim
and with no funding
 A MediaMetrix Top 50 most visited site
 Peaked at 14.8 million page views in a single day
 Amway e-commerce site
 Distributor hands out a business card with

their referral code, required to log in to the

site
 MLM
 Book by Seth Godin - in paperback,
hardcover, and e-book format
 Free to download from the web at

www.ideavirus.com
 Web site also allows you to easily email it to

all your friends

 Most downloaded e-book in history
 An Amazon.com best seller
 Online greeting card site (bluemountain.com)
 Sender chooses an e-card on the site, site

then sends an email to the recipient

prompting them to click on the link to pick
up the card
 Recipient is encouraged to send their own e-

card
 Now the most popular search engine on the
planet
 Came out of nowhere to dethrone the

incumbents
 Spent no money on advertising
 A great service - most relevant results,

fastest, and most complete

 Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence
 Analyzing noise from space
 More than 2 million PCs crunching numbers

in their spare time, for no compensation

 Propagated by ‘powerful sneezers’
 Persistent
 “Wassup Superfriends”
 Budweiser, wisely, didn’t interfere
 Further burned Budweiser’s brand and ad

campaign into our subconscious

 Planted attractive women as paid sneezers
at bars
 When men asked to buy them a drink:

“Absolut gin & tonic”

 After a while, everyone was ordering

Absolut gin & tonics

 Imagine now paying the bar to post a

bestselling drinks list, then it becomes

persistent!
 Gave them away to the ‘popular kids’
 On the condition that they play with them on

the schoolyard
 ICQ
 Ebay
 Paypal
 Vindigo
 Napster
 Hamsterdance
 Southwest - negative WOM spreading like
wildfire
 SMEI Auckland free CD campaign - lukewarm

results
 Amazon.com email campaign - signed “Big

Bird, King of the World, Amazon.com”

 Email marketer’s newsletter - “Ream more”
 Incentive for referring workshop registrant leads: a
free CD on “Guerrilla Selling”
 Auckland chapter’s first experiment with viral
marketing was a non-starter
 Why?
◦ Uncompelling incentive? Non-virusworthy product being
pitched? Poorly presented? Wrong target audience?
 Had good tracking of referral sources (both
partners and individual sneezers)
 www.smei.co.nz/freecd.php
 Viral marketing dwarfs traditional WOM
 Identify your best sneezers
 Make a compelling offering and exploit the

sneezers’ motivations
 Make it easy to spread (“smooth”)
 You can influence, but not control
 Unleashing the Ideavirus by Seth Godin
 The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
 www.digitrends.net/marketing/13640_1085
6.html
 www.cbi.cgey.com/journal/issue6/unleashI
dea.html
 www.webdevelopersjournal.com/articles/sit
e_promotion/sticky_viral_site.html
 www.wellsfargo.com/biz/products/resource
s/advisor/archives/08viral/07viral.jhtml