watts redux (1): virals

Duncan Watts is getting a boost courtesy of this Fast Company article. For those of you after meatier stuff, the much of the original research mentioned can be found here. Now for some reflections...

Viral marketing campaigns mostly fail - i.e. they don't end up generating the huge amounts of buzz. Which is exactly what you would expect in a complex environment - the success of the viral campaign is at the mercy of its environment.

Watts, Peretti & Frumin discuss their concept of Big Seed marketing which basically adds some viral/sociable characteristics to a mass-marketing campaign. I'd like to take a different tack.

Going back to the viral metaphor, one reason that viruses can be so difficult to control is that they mutate and reproduce with unbelievable speed. They are in a constant state of "beta" (one for the nerds there). Most viral marketing campaigns are very unviral in this respect. The agency crafts a brilliant viral artifact and expects people to pass it on.

You don't want invest in creating a single, sterile virus - because the odds are that it will fail. Instead you want to create a virus-generating engine (which, when you think about it, is all a real virus is), something that will create lots of social objects connected to your product/brand. Most of these objects will remain immobile, a tiny fraction will spread.

Ten years ago, that would have been impossible. Thanks to the world of user-generated media, that is no longer the case. People are creating social objects by the truckload every day. A few points:

• Viruses are by their very nature uncontrollable. Epidemics do not spread under the command of a master virus with its base in an extinct volcano somewhere.
• As Watts & co point out, viral marketing and mass marketing are not antithetical. You probably need some way of combining the two.
• How do you measure the effectiveness of virals. Again the Watts & co paper has some interesting measures. But you need a way of quickly sensing your environment to see which objects are spreading and which are not.

Some organisations are already doing this. Who are they?