When I think about social software (which is the context in which "virality" lives, anyway) I think you have to build for three things - in this order:
1. Utility - it must be high utility, even if nobody else is in the system.
2. Network Effect - As people are drawn into the system, it needs to scale in value more than linearly
3. Residual value - Value taken out of the system, sometimes as revenue. Typically ads.
I think that it's not good enough to do these alone, however. You must construct something that isn't just viral but that makes it such that the fact that some person is not on the system is PAINFULLY ANNOYING to the actual users of the system. Consider the growth of email, in general: "Please just go sign up for an email address somewhere so I can email you!"
If you construct it in this manner, you do not have to spam people. Delicious, which has a lot of users, never emailed anything other than password resets, for example.
I used the predecessor to delicious, alone, from 2001-2003. Then delicious took another two years, 2003-2005 to get to tens of thousands of users. So it took a really long time.
Firefox extensions and RSS helped a huge amount. And it was close to one of the first user data sites that had an API (before Flickr, I think...)
1. Utility - it must be high utility, even if nobody else is in the system.
Doesn't this simply exclude some domains. email, facebook, dating sites. Are you suggesting that these domains need to be approached by inserting some basic (slightly unrelated) utility that is useful without other people?
I was just trying to demonstrate pieces that live in the "social software" space which would be difficult to build while conforming to the rule. I suppose it would be possible, but it would be a squeeze of some sort.
I could imagine Skype starting as a phone book or email starting as a way of organising your faxes for the day, but it seems hard.
Say you've made skype. It's really good at being a phone, but it needs more people signed up to become Skype. Now you decide that in order to make more people sign up, you should make it into a great phone book. A lot of people might want to use a desktop phonebook already. If you made a really good one people would use it & once some of their friends used it, they could skype call each other too.
The problem I see with this idea is that you need your Skype to be a good phone & a good phonebook. If we're talking 0 cost, it probably needs to be the best at both. Being the best at anything is hard, two things is really hard.
BTW, I'm not really against the idea of utility. It's a way of cracking the chicken-egg problem. But would you discount the other ways?
I never really said it's a rule. It's the way I think it generally needs to be done. Obviously, there are exceptions.
Skype did not evolve in a vacuum. It piggybacked off the phone system. "Make calls for cheap" - which is a direct call to utility.
Remember that any system that gets its users laid or makes them money can have the users jump through hoops to use it. Anything less than that has to have increasingly more finesse.
I'm going to paraphrase, so I apologise in advance.
Remember that any system that gets its users laid or makes them money can have the users jump through hoops to use it. Anything less than that has to have increasingly more finesse.
Could I distil this to: "Skype got away with not having this because.."?
BTW, I'm not saying that creating something that is useful without a network is bad. It's good. I'm just saying that in many cases it's very hard. Say skype had gone down this path. They may have failed to find some way (eg phone book) of making it useful to just one person.
Forcing the approach seems like unnecessarily inserting a another binary hurdle.
On the other hand, the slightly less elegant approach of getting your small number of users that want to save on phone bills to nag their friends seems more suitable. The existing users have in-built incentive to do this. It's pretty much guaranteed to produce some results.
Iirc, Skype offered cheap international phone calls (to POTS phone numbers) at the same time as skype-to-skype calls... so they were indeed useful even in isolation.
I think one thing you're missing is the idea of social validation, or social proof, of your product. Like TallGuyShort said, getting invitation emails is rather annoying, and quite insincere. Users can spot that insincerity in a heartbeat. Sure, you'll rake in some users, but what you want is to create a demand for the product. When I did that whole FluShirts thing, I used twitter to message people, and within seconds I would see them tweet "haha, check out these shirts [flushirts url]." I'm not sure as to what percentage of shirts I sold were because of twitter referrals, but what that did at the very least was introduce my product to others in a genuine manner to potential customers using their friends.
Of course, to gain social validation of your product, it needs to be useful and something people will enjoy. There are some counterexamples, like hi5, that are fairly popular and got to that point because of their random email invitations (I don't know who you are Aaron, Britney, and Alexa), and to that, I'm not quite sure what to say. I guess they found a market. But as far as virality goes, in the genuine sense, I think Facebook/Myspace/Twitter beat hi5.
"How can I make my app viral" seems like asking yourself "How can I make someone love me".
You don't want to make users want to spread your app, you want them to want to spread your app.
The "Invite people" forms are a really bad way of doing things IMHO. It's like asking your wife/hubby to fill in a form detailing how much she loves you.
I'd also say a good strategy is to give users something for free, that they think should cost money - they'll be sure to tell their friends off their own back.
I actually find the examples it cites extremely annoying. I don't like getting constant emails from services just to remind me they exist, I don't like constantly being asked to give referrals, etc...
If I like something, I go out of my way to recommend it. If not - emails aren't going to convince me you have a good product - if people like it, it ought to spread itself.
Well this isn't just about what you as a user like, it's about what works. A small annoyance on your part may be what makes a product go viral and become successful. It's a fine line of course, but marketing is about pushing a product to users. Not about not being annoying.
I'd say swombat tackled that point appropriately. You have to remind your users of these things, but it doesn't have to be in the form of email communication. http://thesixtyone.com does a brilliant job of this through quests, notifications, and other on-site features. They aren't clogging up my inbox, but they are still telling me about new features, asking me to promote and share, and getting me more involved through internal communication channels. You can't be afraid to talk to your users.
Lets look at an example that I had to deal with about a week ago: The company I work for is having a pretty large event coming up, something that our customers would most likely be very interested in. My boss's reaction was that we should grab the email addresses that we have harvested from our website (signups require an email address), and send those people an email telling them about the event.
I'm sure that the majority of you can predict what my reaction to this was...something along the lines of "No, that is spam, that is bad, part of my job is preventing exactly the type of email you want to send out from making it onto our network. By harvesting email addresses from our website you are violating our customers trust; spam spam spam, BAD!" Naturally, the PHBs did not understand this and, despite my best efforts to stop them, they ended up sending the spam (although I forced them to use a different mail server than we use for sending mails).
After much anger, and much thinking, I have come to a conclusion about this. I have changed my mind. Now...I, as a geek/admin, DESPISE the sorts of mass mailings that they sent out, but why? I hate them because I hear "mass mail" and immediately think "0mG G3t V14GRA N0W!", something that I hate. I know the sorts of slimey tactics that spammers use to evade spam filters, and actively fight against them.
The "problem" is that the majority of my dislike for "mass mailings" are technical. I hate them because they are not what the email system was intended for, and because they are a pain in my ass. You know what, though, they're things that most of our customers want to hear. Looking through my email box, I see that there are some things (mailing lists, google's newsgroup summary emails that come every day telling me what happened in comp.sys.ibm.as400.misc that day, emails from a website called steapandcheap [like woot, but for outdoor gear], backup confirmation emails etc.) that are automated, and might seem evil at first (the commercial stuff like steapandcheap especially) but are actually things that I WANT to see.
Where am I going with all of this?
There is a good chance that your hatred for the sorts of tactics he describes here come from your nature as a geek. The unfortunate reality is that the majority of users just simply don't care. Look at things like myspace, look at success stories like that 15 year old girl that is making 7 figures with her website that does myspace layouts (err..I think she is like 19 now...she was talked about in the 30 woman web entrepreneurs making big $$ article the other day), look at facebook applications like honesty box, these things are HORRIFYINGLY bad from the perspective of a geek. But to a normal person, to the type of person that is keeping the "Click here for a FREE iPoD!" advertisers in business, and to the type of person you're probably trying to attract, these things that we might find "obnoxious", they find useful.
It is a sad reality, but it is a reality nonetheless.
do you not have a checkbox on your sign up form that asks if your customers would like to receive updates? something like that would have skirted this argument altogether. this is an example of why marketing needs to be implemented into the development phase.
A point to add to the discussion from the metrics perspective: the net promoter score.
Net promoter score is an easy tool you can use to determine trends in your users' experience. It can be used as a leading indicator of the 'N' part of your viral coefficient. eries goes in to detail in "Net Promoter Score: an operational tool to measure customer satisfaction" (http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/2008/11/net-promot...).
A counter part to the viral loop is the concept of viral channels. It is important to realize that the more often a viral channel is exploited (see e-mail, app notifications), the less effective it becomes until it actually starts harming your application.
Social / Viral plays these days have a tough time because of how quickly these channels become saturated. IMO you can disregard a lot of the rules in the article as long as your app has network effects and a unique viral channel.
proflower does a lot of "follow up" in the name of repeat business. I get emails daily like "Please accept your savings" and "please fill out our survey" and my favorite "Your $15 shipping rebate" - all scams and wasting my time.
I will never use proflowers again; They don't respect my time. So far I think Amazon does it best.
I think the software that will grow viraly, are soft that need other users interactions.
Let's take for example, a mafia game in Iphone, when you play, you play offline (you are the only player) and your enemy is the computer.
Will the idea grow?
Yes, if it's good, but after 3 or 4 years, may be the device change, or another startup takes your part. So solution? Connected gaming, here's the same game but a little bit different
* You download the game and run it
* The game shows how to play and tell you the vitality of having other players with your to help you
* you tell 2 or 3 of your friends and play together
* game over, your friend now create their band and call another friends, and friends call friends.
you'll finish with millions user in few days, it's like a chain and it spread quickly.
Look at most of the successful games of those kind, they are very simple but succeed
Recently the Facebook-equivalent in my country introduced an API for apps similar to Facebook's and a friend created an app that is doing quite well in terms of users. The trick was to ask the users "Do you think this app would interest your friends?" and if they answered "Yes" it mass-invites all the friends. I think it's against the rules of the site, but since it's good for the site too, the rule is not enforced.
I recall that FB also started out by mass-mailing the Harvard mailing lists.
I guess virality often is just spamming or tricking the user into spamming.
The whole 'viral' meme is rather arogant - the result is the annoying barrage of meaningless 'updates' or solicitations to contaminate your friends. I find the 'spreadable' metaphore promoted by Henry Jenkins (http://henryjenkins.org/2009/04/how_sarah_spread_and_what_it...) much more socially productive.
IMO, that's a distinction without a difference. Viral is viral, whether there is agency involved or not. It's about people communicating and behavior spreading through a social network.
The downside of forcing virality is reflected in additional metrics like retention rates and engagement.
The difference is in acknowledging that the people spreading the message do that out of their own will - not because they have been contaminated by the meme. In other the 'spreadable' metaphor focuses the thinking on why people want to spread the message, what they get out of it, makes the message author to concentrate on cooperating with the spreaders - instead of trying to contaminate them.
Why don't we focus on building applications that add value whether your friends are using it or not. Hence no need to be viral. It can be useful if only 1 person uses it or if 2M people use it.
There is also concept of so-called viral-advertisements. For example - put some video on youtube with something "freaky", "sexy" or "funny" and put your product placement or "message" inside. Then promote that video in some loaded community on social network. Then your link will be spreaded like virus - people will send that "funny" thing to friends, post in blogs and so on.
There are uncounted examples of political statements packed into some music videos of marginal and pseudo-underground bands and the like.
1. Utility - it must be high utility, even if nobody else is in the system.
2. Network Effect - As people are drawn into the system, it needs to scale in value more than linearly
3. Residual value - Value taken out of the system, sometimes as revenue. Typically ads.
I think that it's not good enough to do these alone, however. You must construct something that isn't just viral but that makes it such that the fact that some person is not on the system is PAINFULLY ANNOYING to the actual users of the system. Consider the growth of email, in general: "Please just go sign up for an email address somewhere so I can email you!"
If you construct it in this manner, you do not have to spam people. Delicious, which has a lot of users, never emailed anything other than password resets, for example.