Whoever speaks of viral marketing – on Internet, in marketing departments of huge companies, on marketing and Internet marketing forums – always brings its selling point: effortless exponential growth. However, is it truly exponential? No. Here is why.

It’s probably best illustrated with the traditional spiel of MLM marketers – a special case of viral marketing. They say something like:

You get $1 commission per month for every person in your downline up to level 5. Imagine that you recruited just 10 people, and then every one of then did the same and so on… Then you get:

You
1st level, 10 people 10x$1 = $10
2nd level, 100 people, 100*$1 = $100
3rd level, 1000 people, 1000*$1 = $1000
4rd level, 10000 people, 10000*$1 = $10000
5rd level, 100000 people, 100000*$1 = $100000

Total: $111,110 per month

Nice, isn’t it?

Saturation point

If you’ve been around the block a few times, you already know where the trouble is. Of course, recruiting 10 people is hard in the first place, but that’s not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is that it started long ago, and you are actually on the 10 or 20th level downline from the founder. What does it mean, to be on the 20th level? It means that if the logic above worked, the founder already would have downline expressed as one with 20 zeros afterward. Right, 100,000,000,000,000,000,000. For reference, all humankind is around 5 billion people, that’s 5,000,000,000, less than one with 10 zeroes afterward. See the problem? Almost everybody, who could be recruited, is already recruited. The product already hit saturation point.

Saturation point is one example, how viral marketing hits the ceiling, and once it happened – no growth. So, actual curve for viral marketing is never truly and exponent, but rather a curve like this:

Viral Marketing Curve

It’s exponential at the beginning, but hits its limits and stay more or less constant after that. In fact, you may start losing customers without a chance to acquire new one, in which case it may even go down.

Ok, if that’s not MLM and you decide to use some form of viral marketing, you are the founder. So why should you worry about saturation? You know, your product is great, there are millions of potential customers out there, and you will be very happy long before you’ve got even the first million of customers, right?

Capacity constraints

Well, there is a reason why you should in some cases. The problem is that market saturation is only one kind of capacity constraints, that is when you hit a limit on a resource, you need to grow. With market saturation you hit the limit of the market capacity, but there are other capacities, you may hit, for example:

When selling physical product, capacity of your suppliers, your manufacturing capacity, your processing capacity (too small space for inventory, too few people in shipping).
When selling Internet service, capacity of your servers or bandwidth. If you use Twitter, have you seen a picture of whale carried by little birds? It means that Twitter reached it’s backend capacity – throughput – and was unable to serve your request.
When you make money on personal services – like speaking at seminars or consulting, your own time.
Even if you sell informational product, you may hit bandwidth limits, your server capacity, or your own capacity to handle customer’s questions.

Not all capacity constraints are fatal or even bad.

In fact, sometimes, it may be good. For example, if you hit limits of your own capacity – 24 hours per day – it only means that you need to charge more for your services, which is hardly a bad thing for you.

And sometimes, it may be relatively easily curable. Two small inventory facilities or too few people in shipping are easily cured by oursourcing shipping or hiring more people. Still, that’s no good, because while you adapt, you lose sales and growth. In fact, you may lose so much of a growth that you may have to start all over again. Viral marketing is slow to start, so that could be very noticeable.

The worst thing about capacity constraints and saturation points, is that until you hit them, your viral growth is exponential. It means that once it comes, it comes very quickly. Have you ever heard the old puzzle about the lake and a weed?

A small weed got into a lake. Every day, it duplicates in size. It took 3 months to fill half of the lake. How long is it until it will the whole lake?

The answer is: One day. That’s the power of exponential growth and why capacity constraints are always hit very fast as soon as noticeable growth starts.

Let me explain how it will look for you, if you encounter this problem. You start viral marketing campaign. First day, almost nothing happens. Seconds day, the same. And so day in and day out. Occasional sale here and there, and that’s it. That’s the original growth period, when numbers are still low.

Then you beginning to get some business, but very little, barely noticeable. You are very unhappy, but still it’s better than nothing, and it slowly grows.

And then it grows a little faster, and a little more, and suddenly you are busy whole day. You are happy. You are kicking at full speed, your business is at last the money machine you dreamed of… and that’s when it happen, because the next day you are over your capacity, everything starts to fall apart, your servers are down, your support is flooded with requests, and you have tons of complaints…

Be prepared

So, what can you do? Be prepared. Expect bottlenecks coming to your business. Try to know the expected size of your market and how much of it you want to handle.

If you have a million customers market, there is no need to plan for million customers when you start, but understand that you’ll have to start much earlier than you intuitively may want to. Imagine a viral campaign that grows twice per day with potential market of 1,000,000 customers, your business is only ready for 100,000 customers and you needing a week to upgrade to server 1,000,000 customers. When should you start upgrade? 7 days before you reach 100,000 customers, right? How many customers you will have 7 days before that? 100,000 / 2*2*2*2*2*2*2 = 100,000 / 128 = 782. Right. You have capacity for 100,000 customers, but if your viral campaign brings twice more customers every day, you’ll have to prepare for million customers when you have only 782 customers.

Of course, this example is a little exaggerated. Most viral campaigns don’t bring twice more customers per day — and you should measure and see what the multiplicator is, but you’ve got the idea.

Even better, design your business to have no bottlenecks. Outsource whatever you can to large scalable specialized companies. It’s most likely that it may cost you less than hiring somebody directly. Of course, that may be not an option at the very beginning, but once you get it rolling, this may be your best choice.

And, of course, try to know the real size of your market. If the size of your market is your capacity constraint, if you hit market saturation point, that’s it. You will have to switch from customer acquisition to customer retaining, because that’s all you’ve got. Of course, considering the size of Internet and the fact that more and more new users join it daily, it’s really hard to hit market saturation point, but for some niche businesses that’s possible. If you did, you don’t need viral marketing after that. And, until it happened, worry, learn your market, plan ahead, and enjoy the ride.

Just in case, you’ve never heard of viral campaigns either. What is it?

Viral marketing is pretty much an old fashioned word of mouth, that is, any form of marketing, when people pass your message (including your offer) to each other on their own without you around. One of older (and somewhat special) forms of viral marketing is MLM, but that’s not the only one. iPod and iPhone gained popularity mostly through viral marketing based on popularity and exclusivity. Similar strategy was used for the Starbucks coffee. Hotmail won a lot of customers through a form of viral marketing, by including a signature “I am using free email service from Hotmail!” in every email sent using it. Each Hotmail customer was “infecting” everybody in his address book by simply sending them their own mails.

Sometimes viral marketing works in an unintended way. A great example is software piracy that helped to spread and widely adopt Microsoft Windows and few other Microsoft products. If Apple hardware was more readily available, and Apple software easier to steal, they could have become “the Microsoft” today. Granted, it has cost Microsoft a lot of money, but it have gave Windows a huge market share. In fact, no matter how much music industry complaints about piracy, teenagers swapping MP3 files is one of the biggest reasons for popularity of the top records. Of course, music and video industry has much tougher problem than Microsoft did: one have to be that good for the viral marketing (or piracy) to work, otherwise they just expose that you are trying to sell junk.

In a simplified form, to start a viral marketing campaign you have to provide something (link, eBook, story, literally anything you choose) that has three qualities:

1. People want it.
2. People want to pass it to other people.
3. It’s inseparable from your marketing message.

That’s it. Looks simple, is it? Alas, it is not, but if you do it right, the rewards are huge. Windows. Hotmail. iPod. Britney Spears.

Actually, here we are. This is exactly what the words “anchor”, “carrier” and “payload” mean.

1. An anchor – the reason why people want that thing that you give away. This is the value they get from having it. It may be new knowledge, monetary gain, self-esteem, or anything else, as long as they really want it.

2. A carrier – the reason why people want to give it to others. That’s the value they get from passing it to others. It could be status, monetary gain, respect of others, you name it.

3. A payload – your marketing message. A reason why you want all the trouble of creating it in the first place. That’s what you gain from sending that object out.

Forget about any one of them, and your viral campaign will stumble and die. Do all three right, and reap the results for years and years to come. Your choice.

To be viral, marketing piece should contain a reason for people to remember it (an anchor), a reason for people to pass it (a carrier) and carry your message forward (payload). A good example of viral information is an anecdote. People remember it because it’s funny and pass it… I don’t know why, but they do. It probably helps us to get the time, when we speak and others listen, and that feeds into our social status circuitry.

However, not any anecdote is good for that purpose. Consider taking some old anecdote and putting your name on it (let’s say, the name is Nil Nihil – literally “Nothing nobody”, sum of two zeroes). For example:

Nil Nihil sits under a palm tree and eats a banana.

A rich guy passes by and tells him, “Get me a banana too and I’ll pay you.”

“And what will I do with the money?” Nil Nihil asks.
“You’ll hire other guys, and they will start getting bananas for you. So you’ll get even more money.”

“And what will I do with the money?” Nil Nihil asks again.

“Well, you’ll hire even more guys to get bananas, sell a lot of them and get a lot of money. So others will work and you will sit under the palm tree and eat your banana,” the rich guy answers.

“But I am already sitting under the palm tree and eat my banana,” Nil Nihil answers.

Is it funny? Most people I know say “Yes.” Will they pass it? Yes. What’s wrong? Two things:

First, you pass a wrong message about yourself. Sitting under the tree doing nothing is not exactly what most of us want to be known for.

Second, they’ll pass an anecdote but they have no reason to keep the name. It does not have to be “Nil Nihil”, it may be just “a guy”. Name does not have a purpose in this anecdote. In fact, I know the original of this anecdote in two national cultures, and in both of them it’s politically incorrect.

Consider a different story. I am not saying it’s perfect, but still check it out:

A cruise ship full of Internet marketers sank and they’ve got marooned on a tropic island.

“Nobody buys my eBook anymore”, Shawn Casey complained. “The sales were great but now they flattened out!”

“Don’t blame me,” Ryan Deiss answered. “My autopilot Million Dollar Napkin site sold your eBook to everybody on the island… twice.”

“We can try my Product Launch Formula… again,” Jeff Walker suggested.

“You should use my GPS system for guidance,” Rich Schefren disagreed, “Your constraint is the lack of women. With enough women we could repopulate the island and we’d all get more new prospects.”

“Yep, that’s your problem, guys,” Frank Kern agreed. “I’ve got them all using my Mass Control.”

“That’s why my business on dating advice is booming”, Eben Pagan added.

“But we’ve all got our affiliate or JV share,” John Reese reasoned.

And only Mike Filsaime sat quietly under a palm tree writing down this Ely Asher’s anecdote as a pattern to start his new viral marketing campaign.

You may say that the name still may be changed and some guys will do so to promote themselves. You are right. However, then versions from two different guys will collide and people will get curious, which one is correct. And that’s good for you!

Also, guess which one would it be? Not to mention that those guys did not write the book on memetics, which I forgot to market four years ago.

By the way, if you wonder about legalities, feel free to use this anecdote in your own posts, articles, wherever you want. Just keep it the way it is.

When anybody has a need, the market provides a solution. In this case, the market got a number of so called article spinners. The idea of an article spinner is simple: it goes through your article and replaces words with synonyms, which supposedly mean the same. Some advanced article spinners may also change a sentence structure here and there, again, assumingly, without impacting the meaning.

But do they work?

I did a simple experiment with one of my articles. Let me share just one example of the resulting monstrosity.

I had a sentence “Viral marketing is a craze, but will it work for you?” The article spinner, I used, replaced it with “Viral marketing is crazy, but that works for you?” Ouch… Here comes the first Achilles’ foot of the article spinners: synonyms are not arbitrarily replaceable. Each of them has a special meaning, that’s why they coexists in the language. As soon as your command of the language allows you to use these subtle differences, articles spinners won’t be able to handle your texts.

So, are classic article spinners any good? Can you use them for anything productive?

Ironically, I found that the answer is yes, although not what they are supposed to be used for. When you rewrite an article, your original text makes it real hard to deviate and produce a different content. After all, you really picked the words well when you wrote it in the first place. However, pass it through an article spinner, and it will damage it so much, that you’ll have no problem with the memories of the original article. Fixing a monstrosity is much easier that cannibalizing your own creation.

So, are article spinners any good? As a source of the content for submission, no, but they can provide a great inspiration to do their job by hand. Just don’t overpay for them.

Let’s consider article marketing. The idea is simple: you write an article; you submit it to an article directory; webmasters come and publish it on their sites; you get the links. Period.

Gurus on article marketing usually recommend to concentrate on the article directories with the top Alexa rank. By the way, here are the top 20 with Alexa rank, in case you are interested.

You see, there is more to say about an article directory than Alexa rank. For example, here, I picked up the proportion of the traffic coming from the United States as opposed to the traffic coming from India. So, if you want teh US traffic, gurus are right, the higher Alexa rank, the more traffic comes from the United States. Still, if you consider position 5, 6 and, 7, the seventh contender – Helium – would give you almost twice more US traffic than the 5th one – GoArticles.com. Interesting, isn’t it?

And if for some reason you want an Indian traffic, then you may want to consider a completely opposite approach, picking the bottom of this list. You may wonder, why would you want any Indian traffic in the first place?

First, there could be many reasons, especially, if Indian traffic comes much cheaper or with much less effort. I’ll discuss one idea later in a separate article, but consider two facts:

1. I published this article on ViralMarketingEtc.com, not on InternetMarketingPaterns.com. Why?
2. Check my article “What kind of viral network are you in?”
   Think, is the network of people, who’d buy your products, is the same as network of people, who would spread your viral report?

That’s just one idea how to use Indian Internet traffic. I’ll explain it in another article if you did not catch it. Anyway, there are more.

Why is it here, at ViralMarketingEtc.com? Because submitting free articles is one of the forms of viral marketing. You provide the content with your links and other people cheerfully spread it. If it’s good, of course. That’s viral marketing, all right.

Unfortunately, not all article directories are equal, and eZineArticles.com, although picky, still #1 and most important article directory around.

A short list of the reasons is (but check the videos anyway):

1. Combination of isses 2-10
2. Stolen or ripped content (includes PLR articles because they may be submitted by others; if you ghostwrite, request exclusive rights)
3. Blatant sales and promotion – that’s not what articles are for. Use resource box for that.
4. Keyword abuse – yes, we all want search engine ranking, but don’t make your article a gibberish, unnatural or spammy. About 1 keyword for 100 words and write for people, not for search engines.
5. Spelling and grammar (yes, that’s my sin, especially because of jumping between normal and notebook keyboard). Also, just one space after commas and periods, no more, no less. Ask somebody to proofread.
6. Affiliate links. Not even in the resource box! Not even redirecting link (unless you are ready to sacrifice the whole domain for that one link, see more in video).
7. Excessive links. Only two self-serving links are allowed in the resource box. Two more for other (not yours) sites. None of self-serving links in the artcile itself. Other two (non-self-serving links) after the third paragraph only.
8. URLs with no content or dead links. Your links should work and point to something sensible, not pure advertising, empty pages or sites under construction.
9. Localized niche articles. Not just generic, if writing an article about a particular locale (like city), give specific information, e.g. specfic coffee shops in Chicago if your article is about coffee shops or flavors in Chicago.
10. Formatting issues. No special MS Word symbols (quotes, ellipsis, dash…). Simple text format is the best. Empty line between paragraphs (hard line breaks). Limit HTML tags. Don’t use <ul>, <ol>, <li>, just include numbers and bullets into the artcile.

All social networking sites are not actually social networking. They are just the tools that make social networking easier and father reaching. You still have to do social networking yourself, you just can reach more people, but robots cannot make friends! That’s not Futurama yet and your spambot is not Bender.

Anyway, I always respected Seth Godin a lot, and now I respect him even more. Here it is:

That said, “social networking” is probably a misnomer. If you consider it your personal media outlet, that’s about what you get from Twitter or YouTube. You don’t become friends with people just because they saw your advertising on TV, but it does not mean it’s useless. Cost/value ratio — yes, that’s a big topic for sure.

That overload is quite understandable. While Twitter was around for several years, it experienced an explosive growth in the last couple of years. Some claim it’s because of black hat marketers who use robots to register hundreds of Twitter accounts and massively spam the media. However, if you think about it, that would not work if that was the only reason. Robots may spam, but they don’t read and they don’t order. Spam instantly decreases efficiency of any marketing media to the point where it’s nearly useless. And, to start from, you need already viable marketing media for spam to start in the first place.

With the time, Twitter will get more mature and develop tools to keep spammers off. That’s the same evolution we had with other media: email, forums, search engines, even PPC, you name it. In fact, they just did a massive cleanup on Twitter literally a week or two ago. So, while robots and spammers are part of the problem, they are not the reason for Twitter overgrowth problems.

Why people use the Twitter?

The key is that Twitter organic growth itself is viral (that’s why I write about it here, on ViralMarketingEtc.com). Many people tried Twitter originally, when it just appeared, and dropped from it. I did. After all, think about it. What value to you or to your followers may have a message like “I am sitting in the restroom and twitting this stupid message on my cell phone”? That’s kind of messages you could see on the Twitter originally. The key is there is no real value and that’s the whole point! After all, if you follow one or two thousand people, what’s your chance of seeing their tweets? No much, right? And still a lot of people follow thousands people. What does it tell us?

Reading other people tweets is not why most people use the Twitter.

So, why do they use it? Here comes the viral nature. To be viral any idea or pattern of behavior must have two components:

• An anchor: why would you do that?
• A carrier: why would you pass that to others?

In the strongest viral systems (think totalitarian sects and MLM marketing) the carrier works toward the anchor. And that’s exactly what the Twitter does as long as you get what the Twitter anchor is.

But first, let’s talk about the anchors. There is a very small set of basic anchors that works well. You may invent and sometimes even create new anchors, but that’s a lot of work and it does not work that well. The Big List of “oldies but goldies” include sex, survival, wealth, wellness, social status and social proof of yourself, belonging to a community, and a few more. Did you already noticed, which one the Twitter is using to recruit its users?

You are right, social status and social proof of yourself. “Followers” on Twitter is supposedly people, who read your tweets. We already established that this is not the case, most people have no physical capacity to read the tweets of everybody, they follow. But what matters, is that they are supposed to be reading those. Hence, the number of followers tells how interesting you are, how many people want to read what you have to say to the world. And, let’s admit it, most people don’t have much interesting stuff to tell to the world, so that feeling of importance is not that easy to achieve. Unless you are on the Twitter, of course.

As a result, Twitter ethics evolved to include such rules as “follow those who follow you.” Some people ignore it, and in most cases it means that nobody follows them. A few stars from outside of Twitter world can ignore that rule and still be massively followed, but few stars would never create a mass audience, so who cares? These are the exceptions that only reinforce the rule.

Organic nature of the Twitter problems

Now, consider how it works along with the Twitter technical capacities. Most users come to the Twitter to have social proof of themselves. That social proof is measured by the number of followers. Number of followers in a general case depends on the number of users you follow. Once you follow tons of users, you cannot really read their tweets and, either on one end or another, it becomes an increasingly computationally complex task to Tweeter to deliver all the updates to followers. Hence, the Twitter overloads and pictures of flying whales.

The Twitter will get rid of spam bots, or at least will develop some good detergents from spamming. That’s what it needs to do to survive. In fact, they should have included mail confirmation of new twitter accounts long ago. That’s a good thing not only for most users, but also for you as an Internet marketer, because it will significantly increase the responsiveness of the Twitter as the marketing media. Remember? Bots don’t read your tweets and don’t order. However, this is not the reason why the Twitter gets overload problems!

The twitter overloads are the organic result of the very reason why people are using it in the first place!

What the Twitter does so far

So far the Twitter response was to limit number of people you can follow. Bascially, you cann’t add tons of followers overnight, if you just created the account; you are limited by 2000 people to follow until you get about 1850 people, who follow you; and after that you are limited to about 10% above the number of your followers.

What does it do? First, it cools down the things a bit, and that’s good. Also, it prevents spambot from becoming instant superstars of Twitter and that’s also good. BUT! It also works against the very reason people come to the Twitter.

I literally saw such a message on the Twitter:

Stupid fake celebrities! They follow you to make you follow them, and then they drop you dead, and you are stuck with 2000 followers!

Really. Social proof and status is always a competition. What’s the use to have 2000 followers, if everybody has 2000 followers? It’s nothing, it’s just a baseline, right?

You see? What the Twitter does is shooting itself in a foot by restricting and devaluing the very same reason people come to it!

What to expect?

And now we come to the most interesting question of all: what can we expect in the future and what does it mean to us? It depends on which scenario will take place.

Scenario #1: Twitter will continue restricting users in the number of followers.

For Internet marketers, it’s likely will mean that instead of one Twitter account with a lot of followers, you’ll need to have a number of Twitter accounts with a reasonable number of followers each. Granted, it pushes a lot of marketers into the “gray hat” area to say the least, but 2000 followers is not that great source of traffic, if that’s what you are using the Twitter for. And any reasonable conversation will require you to move those useful followers (potential JVs, etc.) to some other media like Facebook, LinkedIn or something else.

It will also open an interesting business opportunity to those willing to create a service allowing to monitor across several Twitter accounts and help building minimally intersecting followership there. It probably will be developed as a monthly subscription service on a web site, and considering “gray hat” nature of the clientele, should primarily be based on some other, more legitimately looking services, like tracking difference between followers and following.

This scenario will also increase the importance of the viral elements of the Twitter as a marketing media. When you tweet directly to your followers, you are not using it. You are basically just broadcasting it to the fixed audience. However, if any of them retweet, your message becomes viral – it’s passed from your follower to their followers and hopefully further down the line. When the number of your followers is limited, viral component becomes much more important. It means that you will want not just followers, but followers who retweet a lot.

That also creates a business opportunity for a service, probably again website and subscription based, that will monitor your followers for retweets and help you to thank and hone those who do and drop those who don’t. It may also provide automatic courtesy retweets for your best followers.

Scenario #2. The Twitter continues on restriction road too far

While restricting number of follower has some positive value to the Twitter, following that road too far may end up with some other microblogging platform taking over, and the Twitter becoming the thing of the past. It is well known that loyalty on Internet is nearly zero. People follow the last fad and fashion massively dropping the previous one. AltaVista, Netscape and LiveSpaces are just few examples.

If that scenario will take place, you, as an Internet marketer, will have to learn the new media and how to use it. The Twitter may just lose its usefulness as a marketing media.

I hope that won’t happen, but the possibility clearly exists. Of course, it won’t happen if the Twitter will find a solution to its current conundrum of its growth based on exactly the thing that makes it impossible to maintain technically. And that’s possible with the scenario #3.

Scenario #3. The Twitter changing the anchor

We already found out that the very anchor that brings people to the Twitter – the number of followers – is what makes it unsustainable in the long term. If it will make it too hard, other social networks will catch up with it and kill it. What’s better, to have 2000 followers on the Twitter or to have 2000 friends on the Facebook? And where people will go, if the effort will be comparable? Not to the Twitter, right?

If the Twitter will set any hard enough limits, number of followers will become useless and the anchor will disappear. What’s the use to have 2000 followers, if everybody has 2000 followers? So, that’s not a solution either.

But if none of these things will happen, followership will grow exponentially killing the Twitter servers, no matter how much computational power they will put in.

The answer is to replace the anchor with something technically possible to maintain. The good thing, the Twitter does not have to replace the anchor itself, it only have to replace the manifestation of the anchor. People already come to Twitter for the social status and social proof of themselves. You cannot change that without tons of people dropping from the service. But you can change the social system of the network to replace that manifestation with some other number, which does not require exponential growth of computational power and, hopefully, is more sensible than the number of robots following the user.

You may wonder what could it be? Most attentive reader should have guessed by now. Here is you last chance.

Skip these lines to get the answer.

Skip these lines to get the answer.

Skip these lines to get the answer.

Skip these lines to get the answer.

Skip these lines to get the answer.

Skip these lines to get the answer.

Skip these lines to get the answer.

Right. The number of times your tweets were retweeted! It not only shows that a number of people supposedly read your tweets, it means they actually follow you and pass your message along!

To ignite this new metrics, the Twitter will have to add two new counters to the user front page: how many times he retweeted others and how many times he was retweeted by others. First number will tell potential followers whether to follow you or not. The second number is it: your social status on the Twitter.

Counting the number of your own retweets is computationally trivial, no more complex than counting your own tweets in the first place. Counting the number of time you were retweeted is a bit harder, but still much easier that delivering individual tweets to growning number of followers, and this number may be updated on the backend with a delay, so if these backend servers become overloaded, the social status is just updated slower than usual, that’s all. And it’s still much easier computationally than delivering each tweet to thousands of users.

As a side benefit, it will also decrease the load from the services that count retweets. We already found that Internet marketers will need that, and it’s likely that a service will emerge allowing to count retweets by followers. Making these numbers easily available will also reduce the load on the Twitter from such services.

This twist to the Twitter also will significantly improve quality of the tweets and make spambots much harder to use. Currently spambot would just blindly follow as many people as they can, and then drop those who does not reciprocate. Such algorithm is reasonably easy to implement and currently it guarantees eventual growth beyond 10,000 followers.

When retweeting will become important, it is technically possible to write a robot that will occasionally retweet some of the followed users, but the robot cannot evaluate the tweets. Considering that the Twitter network will likely have a “sandwich” nature where robots are layered with real users, you have to retweet high quality tweets only to make them retweeted. Robots cannot do that, at least not yet.

Imagine that User1 sends a tweet: “I am sitting in the rest room”. Robot “User2”, which follows him, retweets: “RT @User1 I am sitting in the restroom.” Guess, how many retweets like “RT @User2 @User1 I am sitting in the rest room.” will he get? Probably none. Maybe an occasional one from another robot.

That will also give the Twitter an interesting metric to take the aim on potential robots: users whose retweets are very rarely retweeted are worth attention.

And in the conclusion…

I don’t know if the Twitter will use that idea or not. Maybe yes, maybe no. But if it will, it will give them ability to continue their growth, still bring value to their customers, and even increase their value to those, who really want to get their message across. In fact, it will significantly increase the viral nature of the Twitter making it a much more valuable PR and marketing media whether for commercial or non-commercial purposes.

Speaking of that, I don’t see why they still did not introduced commercial accounts. Granted, it’s not easy to introduce them ethically, but I guess that’s just a work to be done. Anyway, that’s not what will save the Twitter from its own success. Changing the social status metric will. I hope they do so.

Overall, that’s an application of Seth Godin’s ideas (whom I respect immensely) but in a very old (15-20 years old) way.

The core is to be remarkable. Like “The purple Cow” Just keep in mind, that does not mean “be remarkably stupid.” Not everything remarkable is good. These guys fancy formatted the book, laid it out horisontally, stuffed it with advertising… Well… most of that is not so much remarakable as annoying. Like Frank Kern doing his “sneak attack” on John Reese while people are waiting when he’ll stop fooling around and get to the business. Or, like a telemarketer saying “Good day, mister …your misspelled name… How are you today???”

Back to the eBook. Basically, Jim says, get a web domain name that stands out and that may be your ticket to prosperity. Like www.795MarketingPlan.com (that’s where you can get his book). Or, www.IQuite.com. Or, www.YourPRSucks.com. You’ve got the idea. I still remember the times when domain names broke their length limit, and marketers of that times were spamming everyone in the world with outcries “Wait until midnight when the registration will open and REGISTER YOUR DOMAINS!!!” I wonder, if GoDaddy sponsored this book. If they did, that’s a very repecatble piece of PR, hats off!

Let’s get serious, a great domain name is very important, but it’s not enough all alone. So, why do I write about this book here? Because of two points worth mentioning.

First, that’s a really good example of truly viral campaign. It does not matter that I am critisizing the book, all that matters is that I am writing about it and passing it by (which, I actually, don’t mind at all). Most viral reports include a BRIBE as a carrier, this one has a luxury of not doign so. Respectful. Very respectful piece of work. Don’t rely on that in your own campaigns, it’s not that easy to reproduce, but you should certainly admire what others achived.

Second reason is a bit off the viral marketing topic and falls more into Internet marketing and marketing in general. If you go to page 17 (kind of, they did not put page numbers in an attemmpt to be remarkable – another remarkably stupid idea), then you’ll see a great exercise to create your Unique Selling Proposition. That’s just beautiful. That’s why I wtrite about this eBook. That’s worth reading. Two pages, page #17 and page #18. If you printed it, you can throw other pages to the recycling, but these two you shoudl read.

Not much of a post for today, right? By the way, I also introduced a new category on this site: “Random Stupid Notes”. Enjoy!

Viral marketing is a craze but will it work for you?

You may think, duh! Everybody’s doing this! It has to work!

Well, everybody was buying stock in 1999… until December, and then again in 2006-2007, until 2008. And everybody will chase another latest Internet marketing scheme or newest product today, tomorrow, in ten years.

The truth is, none of those techniques are silver bullets, but mot of them work if you know how to use them and when to use them. Viral marketing is not an exception.

So, will viral marketing work for you? It depends on what kind of viral network are you in.

Networks are different

You see, the only way to do viral marketing is on a network. It does not have to be a computer network, and even when you use Internet, it’s NOT actually a computer network, it’s always a social network, network of people. But networks are different, they have different, as mathematicians call it, topologies.

Topology is simply a pattern of a network. The simplest topology is a loose network, when you actually don’t have any connections and therefore no network at all, but just a bunch of disconnected people.

Loose network

That’s also the prime example of a network, where viral marketing does not work. That’s pretty much Internet marketers networks before the Internet.

Typical Human Network

Of course, people are connected and they were connected long before Internet. There is a research showing that every person on Earth is somehow connected to any other person on Earth with no more than six people between them. It means that you know somebody, who knows somebody, who know somebody (six times), who knows any person you can think of. The chain will be different for different people, but just asking for referral six times will get you to any person on Earth, President Obama, Pope, Oprah, you name it.

The reason is that a typical human has connections which are very similar to the connections of a neurons (brain cells) in our brains. Both have a bunch of short local connections (friends, family, neighbors) plus a few long connections (a friend and former coworker, who moved to another coast, college buddy who now works in Europe, etc.) These long connections allow to go the distance.

Imagine that you need a contact to Pope. You ask your contacts, if they know anybody in Rome. Somebody usually does. Then you contact that guy in Rome (that’s two connection, one local to your friend, and another long to his friend in Rome) and ask him for connection somewhere in the Vatican hierarchy, the higher the better. Rome is a very interconnected city, so some of his local friend smay have such connection. That’s two more connections, again, one local, one long. And then Pope is definitely reachable in one or two connections. It’s like, if you work at Microsoft, you certainly know somebody who knows Bill Gates. I am not saying that convincing all these people to get you to their connection is easy, it’s probably next to impossible in this case, but the connections are there.

So, here is the typical human network (local links in orange, long links in blue, and, of course, local connections are not necessarily four, they vary):

Typical human network

No matter what you do, this is the base network of what you have to deal with, because that’s how people are connected to each other.

General human network is a dream tool for a viral marketer because that’s exactly what it is for. This is how we learn from each other, this is how we pass knowledge, this is how we cooperate and build alliances. And that’s how we did that before schools, colleges, universities or Internet. However, unless you sell something that everybody needs, that’s not the network that will carry your message.

Interest networks

Interest networks are subsets of the general human network with only people interested in a specific topic. Suppose, you want to advertise to Internet marketers. Pick any other niche if you prefer, but that’s the one I will be using as an example. To make your message pass from one person to another you need both of them interested in Internet marketing. You may persuade your prospect to start bothering friends and family, but unless they are interested, it will be like getting untargeted traffic from AdWords: very expensive and totally useless. In fact, that’s exactly what is it like. You will alienate your prospect, you will annoy a lot of people, you will spend money and time doing so, and you won’t get the sales.

Now, the question is, does your prospect know somebody who is also interested in Internet marketing (or whatever you niche is)?

You can answer this question if you know the topology of the interest network for your niche, in our example, Internet marketing niche.

Imagine that people who are interested in Internet marketing are those marked green in this picture:

Interest network

In the example above, the interest network is basically a loose network with no marketing value at all. If this is your case, Google AdWords and other search engines and advertising networks are probably the only way to get the customers. And that’s a very expensive way to get customers, so if that’s the niche you are looking at, you may want to look someplace else.

Fortunately, most of interest networks have a much better topology. That happens because people tend to talk to each other about the things, they are passionate about, and spend more time with those, who are interested in the same things.

Hub Network

Most common interest network type is a Hub Network. Here is how it looks like.

Hub network

This is not the greatest network to do viral marketing, but it will work. In a Hub Network you have a few disconnected people with a lot of connections, and the rest connected to one or more hubs. Classic viral marketing does not work in a Hub Network, because most people are disconnected. However, once you get one of the hub people to carry your message, you bang for a buck goes wild. Naturally, most of hub people are well aware of their position and it probably will cost you money to make them publicize your message to their followers.

A classic example of a Hub Network is some low profit niche dominated by eZines. And guess why is it low profit? Because it costs a lot to advertise to it.

You may be temptet to think that Internet marketing niche has a hub network, but wait for a moment to see…

Guru Network

Guru Network is similar to the Hub Network, only in Guru Network hubs are very well interconnected. They know each other, they network on conferences, getaways and cruises, and they do Joint Vetures (JVs). Sounds familiar?

That’s how Guru Network looks like:

Guru network

Notice that the rest of the people are still disconnected, so there is no sense to torture them for email addresses of their friends. Guru Network is also driven by deals with hubs (”gurus”) and there is not much you can do with that. Is Internet marketing carried on Guru Network? Looks like that, however, that’s probably not the complete story.

Cluster Network

Cluster Network is a combination of generic network and loose network. How can it be possible? Here is how:

Cluster network

In a cluster network people are organized into small and large clusters. They are very well connected inside their clusters, but the clusters themselves are mostly disconnected. What it gives you is that once you hit a cluster, you are likely to get a lot more people from the same cluster. Clusters work as sort of multiplicators significantly helping to pass the message, however, your message does not go between clusters.

Cluster network is the last form before the generic human network, which is essentially cluster network with long connections between clusters. One intermediate version will be a combination of Cluster Network and Hub or Guru Networks, where those extra long connections are provided by hubs or gurus.

A good example of a cluster network are reading groups for marketing a printed book.

So, what’s in it for you?

Knowing your network is important, and it’s different for each niche.

Loose network is a tough one unless your margins and conversion allow you to swallow advertising costs (AdWords) and still make a profit. You can improve that with some continuity (e.g. mailing list) however, especially if you develop several products, including backend products to sell. What’s good about loose networks, your competition has similar problem when they are trying to steal your affiliate sales from you. On a loose network stealing is as hard as getting the customer. However, once you get the competition and it will start to do the same, your loose network may evolve into a Hub or even Guru network. Using affiliates to market your product on a loose network may be tough, because your affiliates will struggle and retention won’t be that good. Affiliate trains may be helpful in this case. That’s the type of networks, where you may want to think about PPC or PPC to CPA arbitrage, but test first if it works there.

Hub network based niches may work well for you as long as you have a unique proposition clearly distinct from niches used by hubs, but still addressing the same target audience. In this case, making hubs to promote your products through JVs may be not that tough to achieve.

On another hand, affiliate marketing in a hub network is somewhat difficult, because most people in it are already “infected” with hub’s affiliate IDs, and even if you get somebody to have your cookie, it’s likely to be overwritten soon by some hub, even if he promotes a different offer. Have you ever seen bonus offer ending with “Now, clean your cookies in the browser, go to this link and get the program. Once you do, send me the receipt to receive your bonuses.” Guess what does it mean? All your Amazon and Clickbank affiliate cookies are gone that instant from the prospect’s machine. That’s not even stealing affiliate commissions, that nuking them into oblivion.

Guru network based niches have about the same advantages and issues as Hub networks. One big difference is that because gurus are interconnected, and they collectively own one of the most important advertising channels, it’s your reputation among them that defines your success in the niche. Think about Hollywood.

And the last one, generic human network. It happens when your product has a very wide appeal. Think diet and weight loss. Think EXTRA income as opposed to replacing 9 to 5 with your own business. Think cosmetics. Generic human network is great for viral distribution and MLM. On another hand, it may be not that great for affiliate sales, because people are likely to pass the actual website, and not your message or your affiliate link to their friends. In other words, when it comes to on the generic human networks and unless you know some trick to sell there affiliate product, sell your own products there. And if it’s a physical product, you should be the retailer, not an affiliate. If you want to attract affiliates, you may want start creating automatic retail webstores for them. Cookies won’t do.

Now, how do you find out, which type of network you are in?

Yes, that’s the tough one. I’ll write about that soon.