Learning Viral: Is your product a natural or add-on?
okdork.com
An idea I learned from a leading venture capitalist about building viral as the core of your product...Thoughts?
okdork.com
"I'm invited to a party? Well, yes, I'll rsvp and invite other cool people..."
Now if you take a multi-player game where I have to send out an invite to another user to play, that's viral. It's built into the game. That's why a game like Scrabulous can spread so quickly within Facebook (and that's how I was introduced to it).
There is another comment here that Google is viral. I think that's another example of popular, not viral. I can use Google 100 times a day to search, but there is nothing that I'm doing that introduces Google to other users unless I just actively send them an email. Hotmail, on the other hand, seems more viral to me because, as a user, I'm using it just to send mail, but I'm passively promoting it to every person I send an email to because there is a link in the message -- I don't need to do anything other than just use the product for its intended purpose for it to be viral. That won't happen with Google.
Some might argue that some videos are viral even though the user has to actively pass the link on to someone else, but I don't think that's how a site or an application becomes viral. Also, most content goes viral because it's posted a relatively small number of times to sites with relatively large numbers of visitors (Digg, for example).
I may be off-track here as far as what most people consider viral, but I get the sense that in general, to be viral, the increase in users has to be either from passive behavior of existing users (like Hotmail) or because there is a real benefit to an existing user by introducing new users (like Scrabulous or even Facebook in general). Maybe the term "viral" has been so overused that it is now synonymous with "popular". If that's the case, then you can ignore this entire reply ;-)
i think viral is so overused it could be called the internet.
there are many things out there considering to be viral since they are growing. bottom line: who cares. i think if your site/product is good it should grow (grows better with math/analytics) and stick around (if you continually improve it).
To date, however, marketers have had difficulty reproducing the success of a handful of viral campaigns, such as 'The Blair Witch Project,' HotMail, and the 'Dancing Baby.'"
Viral marketing requires things achieve popularity through word-of-mouth replication, not big-budget marketing. So if my solitaire gets 20 good reviews that get 20 downloads each, and spawns 20 more good reviews, &c., it is virally successful. You might not like that that's how the term is used, but you're about 7 years too late.