The following article is reprinted with the permission of its author, Dr. Ralph Wilson. Though the article is several years old, I think its points are still relevant and presented in a beginner-friendly format.

The Six Simple Principles of Viral Marketing
by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson, E-Commerce Consultant
Web Marketing Today, February 1, 2005. Originally published 2/1/2000
Easy Transfer Copy

I admit it. The term “viral marketing” is offensive. Call yourself a Viral Marketer and people will take two steps back. I would. “Do they have a vaccine for that yet?” you wonder. A sinister thing, the simple virus is fraught with doom, not quite dead yet not fully alive, it exists in that nether genre somewhere between disaster movies and horror flicks.

But you have to admire the virus. He has a way of living in secrecy until he is so numerous that he wins by sheer weight of numbers. He piggybacks on other hosts and uses their resources to increase his tribe. And in the right environment, he grows exponentially. A virus don’t even have to mate — he just replicates, again and again with geometrically increasing power, doubling with each iteration:

In a few short generations, a virus population can explode.

Viral Marketing Defined

What does a virus have to do with marketing? Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message’s exposure and influence. Like viruses, such strategies take advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to thousands, to millions.

Off the Internet, viral marketing has been referred to as “word-of-mouth,” “creating a buzz,” “leveraging the media,” “network marketing.” But on the Internet, for better or worse, it’s called “viral marketing.” While others smarter than I have attempted to rename it, to somehow domesticate and tame it, I won’t try. The term “viral marketing” has stuck.

The Classic Hotmail.com Example

The classic example of viral marketing is Hotmail.com, one of the first free Web-based e-mail services. The strategy is simple:

1. Give away free e-mail addresses and services,
2. Attach a simple tag at the bottom of every free message sent out: “Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com” and,
3. Then stand back while people e-mail to their own network of friends and associates,
4. Who see the message,
5. Sign up for their own free e-mail service, and then
6. Propel the message still wider to their own ever-increasing circles of friends and associates.

Like tiny waves spreading ever farther from a single pebble dropped into a pond, a carefully designed viral marketing strategy ripples outward extremely rapidly.

Elements of a Viral Marketing Strategy

Accept this fact. Some viral marketing strategies work better than others, and few work as well as the simple Hotmail.com strategy. But below are the six basic elements you hope to include in your strategy. A viral marketing strategy need not contain ALL these elements, but the more elements it embraces, the more powerful the results are likely to be. An effective viral marketing strategy:

1. Gives away products or services
2. Provides for effortless transfer to others
3. Scales easily from small to very large
4. Exploits common motivations and behaviors
5. Utilizes existing communication networks
6. Takes advantage of others’ resources

Let’s examine at each of these elements briefly.

1. Gives away valuable products or services

“Free” is the most powerful word in a marketer’s vocabulary. Most viral marketing programs give away valuable products or services to attract attention. Free e-mail services, free information, free “cool” buttons, free software programs that perform powerful functions but not as much as you get in the “pro” version. Wilson’s Second Law of Web Marketing is “The Law of Giving and Selling” (http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmta/basic-principles.htm). “Cheap” or “inexpensive” may generate a wave of interest, but “free” will usually do it much faster. Viral marketers practice delayed gratification. They may not profit today, or tomorrow, but if they can generate a groundswell of interest from something free, they know they will profit “soon and for the rest of their lives” (with apologies to “Casablanca”). Patience, my friends. Free attracts eyeballs. Eyeballs then see other desirable things that you are selling, and, presto! you earn money. Eyeballs bring valuable e-mail addresses, advertising revenue, and e-commerce sales opportunities. Give away something, sell something.

2. Provides for effortless transfer to others

Public health nurses offer sage advice at flu season: stay away from people who cough, wash your hands often, and don’t touch your eyes, nose, or mouth. Viruses only spread when they’re easy to transmit. The medium that carries your marketing message must be easy to transfer and replicate: e-mail, website, graphic, software download. Viral marketing works famously on the Internet because instant communication has become so easy and inexpensive. Digital format make copying simple. From a marketing standpoint, you must simplify your marketing message so it can be transmitted easily and without degradation. Short is better. The classic is: “Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com.” The message is compelling, compressed, and copied at the bottom of every free e-mail message.

3. Scales easily from small to very large

To spread like wildfire the transmission method must be rapidly scalable from small to very large. The weakness of the Hotmail model is that a free e-mail service requires its own mailservers to transmit the message. If the strategy is wildly successful, mailservers must be added very quickly or the rapid growth will bog down and die. If the virus multiplies only to kill the host before spreading, nothing is accomplished. So long as you have planned ahead of time how you can add mailservers rapidly you’re okay. You must build in scalability to your viral model.

4. Exploits common motivations and behaviors

Clever viral marketing plans take advantage of common human motivations. What proliferated “Netscape Now” buttons in the early days of the Web? The desire to be cool. Greed drives people. So does the hunger to be popular, loved, and understood. The resulting urge to communicate produces millions of websites and billions of e-mail messages. Design a marketing strategy that builds on common motivations and behaviors for its transmission, and you have a winner.

5. Utilizes existing communication networks

Most people are social. Nerdy, basement-dwelling computer science grad students are the exception. Social scientists tell us that each person has a network of 8 to 12 people in their close network of friends, family, and associates. A person’s broader network may consist of scores, hundreds, or thousands of people, depending upon her position in society. A waitress, for example, may communicate regularly with hundreds of customers in a given week. Network marketers have long understood the power of these human networks, both the strong, close networks as well as the weaker networked relationships. People on the Internet develop networks of relationships, too. They collect e-mail addresses and favorite website URLs. Affiliate programs exploit such networks, as do permission e-mail lists. Learn to place your message into existing communications between people, and you rapidly multiply its dispersion.

6. Takes advantage of others’ resources

The most creative viral marketing plans use others’ resources to get the word out. Affiliate programs, for example, place text or graphic links on others’ websites. Authors who give away free articles, seek to position their articles on others’ webpages. A news release can be picked up by hundreds of periodicals and form the basis of articles seen by hundreds of thousands of readers. Now someone else’s newsprint or webpage is relaying your marketing message. Someone else’s resources are depleted rather than your own.

Put into practice

I grant permission for every reader to reproduce on your website the article you are now reading — “The Six Simple Principles of Viral Marketing” (see http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt5/viral-principles-clean.htm for an HTML version you can copy). But copy this article ONLY, without any alteration whatsoever. Include the copyright statement, too, please. If you have a marketing or small business website, it’ll provide great content and help your visitors learn important strategies. (NOTE: I am giving permission to host on your website this article AND NO OTHERS. Reprinting or hosting my articles without express written permission is illegal, immoral, and a violation of my copyright.)

When I first offered this to my readers in February 2000, many took me up on it. Six months later a received a phone call:

“I want to speak to the King of Viral Marketing!”

“Well, I’m not the King,” I demurred. “I wrote an article about viral marketing a few months ago, but that’s all.”

“I’ve searched all over the Internet about viral marketing,” he said, “and your name keeps showing up. You must be the King!.”

It worked! Even five years later this webpage is ranked #1 for “viral marketing.”

To one degree or another, all successful viral marketing strategies use most of the six principles outlined above. In the next article in this series, “Viral Marketing Techniques the Typical Business Website Can Deploy Now” (http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt5/viral-deploy.htm), we’ll move from theory to practice. But first learn these six foundational principles of viral marketing. Master them and wealth will flow your direction.

“Copyright © 2000, 2005, Ralph F. Wilson, E-Mail Marketing and Online Marketing editor, Web Marketing Today. All rights reserved. Permission granted to reprint this article on your website without alteration if you include this copyright statement and leave the hyperlinks live and in place.”

• Depends on the company
• Who’s going to use social media in different ways?
• Figure it out ahead of time make sure delineations are clear–line item documentation.
• Make sure someone from senior team has sense of ownership – a C-level “champion”

Outreach and Community (bring wine to the picnic)

• Go out and start interacting with a community, bring something to the table that’s valuable before expecting anything back; Give people information, no questions asked
• Most important points: be present, listen, connect, be human, measure meaningfully.

What comes next?

• Marketing shifts into business conversations, storytelling replaces ads (content marketing), mass customization)
• Example: give product to customers and let them have video blogs, create content around their experiences (let them drive the car, carry around the camera phone, etc).
• Were Transformers the ultimate experience ad for GM?

Question and answers section

Q: How do you use time efficiently for social media?
A: Email is a huge time-sucker–does all that time employees spend sending email provide business value? Find business opportunities and go after them. Understand that you are doing more than just tweeting; you must have a strategy, identify conversion points, and measure success.

Q: How much of social media is a fad and how much will stick around?
A: Social media has hit a nerve in our collective psyche. Maybe twitter et al is not the end game, but it’s a step along the evolution of new opportunity.

Q: How do you demonstrate the value of social media marketing for a b2b company?
A: See case studies on Chris Brogan’s delicious account. There’s less of a difference than people think between b2b and b2c. The boss is really your client – how do you convince that client to engage in inbound marketing?

Q: Should social media marketing be done in-house?
A: Having an agency run your social media campgins is like having Brittney Spears hiring her PR agent to tweet for her. Agents should be involved as an educator, showing in-house staffers what to do.

Q: What’s the easiest way to win buy-in from Management?
A: Show them a competitor doing the same project and succeeding at it.

Q: How do you respond to managers’ fears of “losing control”?
A: This is a drinking game for marketers: We’re supposed to say, “You never had control of your message to begin with,” and then we take a drink. Remember that an email in-box can spread negative press, too. There was a similar same fear around IM when it was released. consider a social media policy for employees engaged in social media marketing endeavors. You can replace the word “email” with “twitter” in your company’s email policy and it will probably apply.

Q: Should you avoid social media if you don’t have time to fully engage in a particular site?
A: Don’t bite off more than you can chew. Start small and grow your program as you see results.

Q: How do you demonstrate ROI on social media/inbound marketing efforts?
A: Compare the cost of employees who are doing the work versus payback/leads generated.

Students of my social media seminar series: Notice how similar much of this information is to what I’ve been telling you for the past 3 weeks? *wink*

How to Demonstrate the Value of Social Media to Your Boss
with Chris Brogan and the HubSpot team

The boss’s question: Don’t you have something better to do??

We’re trained to ignore content on a huge scale. It’s really important for companies humanize the Web, to get people to “un-ignore” content and turn off the mental filter that keeps us from being distracted by the 1000000 or so ads with which we are bombarded every day.

The Landscape of Possibilities

Blogs

A blog is a digital content source that provides solutions, in which you can thread in (useful!) marketing messages.
Selling points:

• Great for search, easy to manage, just plain swell
• You can create a communication bridge with readers (e.g., rss, email subscribe, links to social places)
• You can target a niche audience (that share specific interests) instead of blasting generic information to everyone in the whole world

Twitter (or, What Seems to be the Stupidest Idea Ever

Yes, the Twitter feed seen in its entirety looks random and chock-full of useless information. the trick is to put it in context:

• Show the boss applications such as TweetDeck to demonstrate specific conversations instead of the unfiltered Twitter stream
• Harness the power of Twitter Search (listening to conversations of needs to identify areas of opportunities for the company to make offers)
• Listening tool: What do Tweeple say they need? What can you offer?

Community Platforms (If You Build It, Will They Come?)

Should you build your own community space for your company?

• Dell IdeaStorm is a compelling example of collecting, listening to, and responding to customer input.
• Dell also launching specialized versions of IdeaStorm to vertical markets (Healthcare)
• Starbucks has its own flavor of IdeaStorm now.

Social Networks (Outposts)

Alternately, you can establish “outposts” on existing social networks such as Facebook.

• Make your social space about your customers, not your product.
• It’s not about you; it’s about how you empower your users.
• Facebook Ads are worth a look; can be highly targeted to interest groups.
• Facebook is adding 700,000 new people a day (35-65 yr old range).
• LinkedIn Groups are also gaining traction as a useful social space.

Video (and by That, We Often Mean YouTube)

• YouTube releases 100 million videos a day, making a place companies definitely want to be.. BlendTec (of “Will It Blend?” fame) increased online sales 500% (most requested item to blend? another Blendtec blender)
• iPhone apps, especially location-based apps (what if you could brand an experience of location-based fun? )

How to Argue Effectively (How to Best Position the Work)

• http://delicious.com/chrisbrogan/casestudy
• Explain how social media aligns with sales needs and reduces customer acquisition costs
• Avoid justifying social media because “it’s cool”–stay focused on business value
• Address strategy alignment (sales leads, branding/awareness/organic SEO (blogs,customer service, product marketing)

HR needs

• Which departments will own social media strategy?
• How many people needed to run SM campaigns

Implementation

• Use the “bridges and islands” strategy (Separatize the pilot effort to reduce risk and limit investment resources and then show how the process moves backwards into the organization)
• Make measurements (tricky)
• Demonstrate small victories to justify future efforts and expense

What to Do with Listening

• Get unguarded, unfettered customer feedback for PR, marketing, product research, customer service, what else?
• free tools for search: http://search.twitter.com, http://blogsearch.google.com, http://technorati.com, http://alltop.com
• Bucket all this information into Google Reader.
• Google the phrase “grow bigger ears” and hopefully Chris Brogan will appear as the #1 result

Equip and Empower (Give Your Ideas Handles)

• Giving your ideas handles means giving other people the ability to take the idea and do something with it
• Give someone flip video campera
• Give them sense of participation
• encourage uploading, tagged photos/videos
• Curate such content (don’t have to share every single wart along the way, for once it’s okay not to be 100% transparent
• Produce a best-of, giving credits to others
• Develop slideshows (animato, slideshare)
• Provide promo materials to bloggers ; must be pertinent to their respective audiences
• Use hashtags #####

Whose Job Is This?

It can be a combination of marketing, PR, sales, and internal (HR/training). the responsibilities can shift over time.

The New Presence (What All These Tools Mean)

• Creating a Home Base: your Web site isn’t “the site” anymore, but rather a home base for your entire social presence.
• Ouposts are the social places where you can establish a presence
• Outposts to start with: Twitter, LinkedIn or Xing, Facebook, Yelp, upcoming.org
• Realize that there are tons of places to go to find your audience, and you don’t have to be on all of them. in fact, spreading yourself thin is bad
• Pick a few outposts depending on the interests of your audience.

Some Useful Passports

A “passport” is a location where you can be standing by in order to jump into the online conversation quickly if you need to.

• WP.com, flickr, gmail 9Google Groups), yahoo, discuss, delicious, twitter, facebook, openid.org, brightkite, yelp
• Be available and ready to jump into conversations.

Whew! that’s a lot of information, and I’m not done yet. Stay tuned for Part II, coming soon!

Whether I actually publish this post is still up in the air. I’ll decide when I’m finished. Therein lies…

Challenge #1: No Post Is Interesting Enough

I will need to encourage my students not to let the pursuit of perfection stand in their way. I am guilty of starting and deleting blog posts that I felt were not good enough, not timely enough, or that I guessed my intended audience wouldn’t care about. Hence, dead silence in the blogosphere. Not productive. I do have lots of great ideas, but they always seem to come to me in the middle of the night, when I’m too tired to do anything about it. Surprisingly, sometimes these ideas don’t seem quite as sterling in the morning as they did eight hours earlier, leading me to…

Challenge #2: Getting into a Schedule for Writing

Sure, no time is ever convenient for posting a blog when there’s laundry to be sorted, Web sites to be coded, and a hundred other Things That Must Be Done Before I Go To Bed. I need to encourage my students to find a time slot to carve out for themselves—a time where they are relaxed but not sleepy, energized but not wired. Does this time exist? I’m not sure, but clearly it’s my responsibility to invent it if it doesn’t exist. After all, blogging is part of my marketing plan.

Marketing plan…oh, wait. That brings me to…

Challenge #3: Finding a Blog Strategy

For some people, blogging is a way of pouring out their hearts to the world. When you blog for business purposes, you do want to speak honestly about the things you are passionate about. But it is a calculated expression to a degree, carefully crafted to be truthful at all times but also project the persona that you want the world to see. No ranting, no soapboxes, no pictures of your cat. You decide ahead of time what the purpose of your blog is, what kind of content you want to publish, and what kind of audience you want to attract.

If you are not clear on the why, what, who, and when (see Challenge #2), then posting regularly becomes a real burden. Aligning your values and your business plan, managing your time so that you can devote your best self to your blog, and creating a well-defined plan for blogging with purpose will help get you on track.

Yeah, that’s what I’ll tell them in twenty minutes.

Last year Nielsen Online reported that people are using social media more than email. They’re talking about your business. Are you ready to join the conversation?

Learn how to use social media tools such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, social bookmarking and media sharing sites, and blogging to connect with your customers and inspire them to spread the word about you. (In other words–don’t tell them you’re awesome, show them you’re awesome by listening to them and giving them helpful information that they’ll want to share with others.)

Each information-packed 2-hour session costs $40, or sign up for all 5 sessions for $180. See the Gelfand Design Facebook Page for meeting details. There are only 8 spots per class, so don’t wait to contact me and guarantee your seat! Keep reading for information about each of the 5 available sessions.

(Wed, 4/1, 5–7 PM) JOINING THE TWITTERATI: A BRIEF HISTORY OF MICROBLOGGING

As if our attention spans weren’t short enough already, microblogging has taken off as a way for users to blast short (140-character) messages to their followers. What can you do with 140 characters? Plenty! Twitter is changing the business model of the public relations industry. Find out how to get in on the fun at this round-table seminar. You’ll get detailed instructions for setting up and using your own Twitter account, case studies galore of successful companies leveraging Twitter, and some big-picture insights into how microblogging is changing our world.

(Wed, 4/8, 5–7 PM) WILL U FRIEND MY BRAND? AN INTRODUCTION TO FACEBOOK

Facebook is a social networking Web site that connects people with friends and communities of interest. Although Facebook may be considered a social playground compared with “business networking” sites such as LinkedIn, the boundaries are quickly blurring. In a world where you are your brand, leveraging Facebook for your business has never been more vital. Learn how Facebook works, how to get started, applications you can use to promote your profile, and plenty of case studies and inspiration.

(Wed, 4/15, 5–7 PM) BUSINESS BLOGS THAT PEOPLE ACTUALLY WANT TO READ

These days it’s de rigueur for every business to host a blog alongside its main site. But how do you keep a blog going with your busy schedule, much less set one up to begin with? And what’s the point, anyway? We’ll go over the nuts and bolts of blogging, the anatomy of a blog site, how successful companies leverage their blogs, and reputation management in the blogosphere.

(Wed, 4/22, 5–7 PM) YOU CAN’T NETWORK IF YOU CAN’T WORK THE NET: USING LINKEDIN

Tap into the benefits of a well-developed LinkedIn presence! You may already know that LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional networking Web site with over 37 million users (and growing) and that you can use it to network, share your expertise, and find work opportunities. But did you also know that you can use LinkedIn to improve your Google page ranking, increase Web traffic, perform industry research, and much more? You’ll learn how to set up and manage your profile, applications you can use to enhance your profile, and dozens of other tips and techniques for effective online networking.

(Wed, 4/29, 5–7 PM) DO PEOPLE DIGG YOU? SOCIAL BOOKMARKING FOR PRODUCTIVITY AND PROFIT

Social bookmarking sites such as Digg and Delicious allow people to collect and share items on the Web they find interesting. Social bookmarking can dramatically increase traffic to your site. It can also supercharge your own productivity by allowing you (and your team if you have one) to find, store, annotate, and share information like never before. We’ll also cover how to promote your business and increase Web traffic with Flickr, YouTube, and other media sharing sites in this session.

If you are interested in a class but can’t meet at the scheduled time and date, let me know. I’ll create new sessions based on demand.

1. Browse Web site galleries for inspiration. One of my old standbys is CSS Remix, but I am a great fan of finding any random site about Web design and following a daisy chain of “Related Article”  links. You never know what might pop up.
2. Start a morgue file. As you browse the Web (or thumb through magazines or walk by something interesting on the street), collect images of any visual element that strikes your fancy. Lots of people save their Web design morgue files on Flickr, but a manila folder full of clippings will work just fine, too.
3. Take a hike. Or go cycling. Or hit the gym. Just get some fresh air and exercise. I tend to think of things while I’m walking around the neighborhood.
4. Brainstorm and sketch. Set a time limit and force yourself to sketch six layouts, no matter how implausible or lousy you think they are. I usually grab a piece of scratch paper from the recycling bin and divide the page into six boxes. Then I fill those six boxes–no stopping at two or three.
5. Try some reverse psychology. If you have a vision stuck in your mind of what you’re trying to accomplish, go design the polar opposite. Do something with a completely different layout, tone, or look-and-feel (no matter how garish, tacky, totally against your aesthetic sensibilities).
6. Make a word association chart. I call these “bubble charts,” where I start with the name/subject of my site in the center of the page and draw a spider’s web of associations around it. Let your mind roam. Indulge in word play. Explore the emotions you want to evoke in your audience.
7. Snort a few lines of coke. Just kidding.

Now I’m going to try to follow my own advice and see how it goes. Hope my next post includes a link to my new Hidden Mickey site. Wish me luck, folks!
UPDATE: HOLY COW, I THINK IT’S WORKING. HOORAY!

(Hsieh’s comments on values and culture echoed the work of Richard Barrett, author of Building a Values-Driven Organization: A Whole System Approach to Cultural Transformation, whom I met last year when he held an organizational development seminar here in Austin.)

Zappos has made superior customer service its primary goal. They offer a 365-day return policy, “surprise” upgrades to free overnight shipping, and 24/7 warehouse operations to ensure that products are shipped on time. Zappos does  not rely on traditional advertising; instead, they aim to convert happy customers into brand ambassadors who spread the word far more effectively than a banner ad or a commercial. The money that might have gone toward advertising is invested in company culture.

Hsieh outlined seven steps to building a successful brand.

1. Decide if you are willing to build a long-term, sustainable brand.
2. Figure out your values sooner rather than later. Build a team whose personal vales are aligned with corporate values.
3. Commit to transparency.
4. Chase the vision, not the money.
5. Build relationships (as opposed to networking).
6. Build your team thoughtfully.
7. Think long-term.

So You Wanna Build Your Own Portfolio….

• Carbonmade online portfolio service
• Free Flash portfolio templates from Warm Forest
• Slideshow Pro Gallery for Flash
• Ajax/Javascript/DHTML Gallery Scripts
• Get a Free WordPress Blog
• Get a Free Blogger Blog
• Install a Free WordPress Blog on your Web Site
• WordPress Themes for Photographers
• Prophoto Themes for Photographers
• Top 10 Photoblog Themes and Templates
• 12 Free Photoblog Templates for Blogger
• Also see Photobucket under “Promote and Sell Your Work”

Inspiration

• 99 Remarkable Photographer’s Portfolios
• 25 of the Best Photographer Portfolio Web Sites
• Top 100 Photography Blogs
• Fine Art Photoblog
• One Page Love gallery of single-page Web sites

Promote and Sell Your Work

• MOO Custom Printing Service
• How to Use Flickr to Promote a Photography Business
• Secrets to Selling and Publishing Photography (lynda.com online training)
• Comprehensive Guide to Using Flickr for Traffic Building and Brand Marketing
• How to Market on Flickr
• Using Flickr in Your SEO & Linkbuilding Strategy
• Photobucket (image hosting, free photo sharing, free video sharing)