Since March we have acquired over 40 new customers, and our viral programs now comprise a network of over 20 million consumers - and as we run more and more programs on our platform, we continue to observe key insights and subtleties around producing viral results.

For example, one thing we have seen repeatedly is that in order for virality to scale, clarity is key — clarity of the value proposition, clarity of the messaging, clarity of the social standing one can achieve by both participating in and sharing an experience. As a marketer, the time window you have to motivate a consumer to act is usually a matter of seconds, and lack of clarity can be disastrous for viral activity. Often marketers try to become too clever when attempting a viral campaign, but the subtle truth is that too much cleverness and complexity can lose the audience in that split second where they are deciding whether or not to share an experience with their peers. When the value of both participating in and sharing an experience is immediately clear, viral activity is much more likely to flourish.

A key to our success is our ability to deeply understand and measure the behavior of consumers, and to steer them towards what motivates them to act. Even with the best creative campaign, if it does not use clarity to play to an individual’s motivation to share, it will never achieve meaningful viral results.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 28th, 2007 at 10:00 am and is filed under Viral Marketing News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.