Indeed, over the past two decades we have seen an evolution in the way we discover content we consume online. According to Sachin Rekhi what started with mega portals such as sevices like Prodigy (1999) and AOL (1991) which provided the first national access to online media and build huge newsroom staffs as well as partnerships with existing offline content providers to bring news, these services eventually provided access to internet, leading to the internet boom. Yahoo (1995) and MSN (1995), two services which embraced the open web came about and continued to direct online consumption.
Eventually big new brands like NYTIMES (1996) and CNN (1995) made their way online until the rise of blogs, RSS< and Content Producers. The web openeded up the possibility of anyone becoming a content publishers and thus came the advent of blogging. Blogger (1999) launched along with many others. Read the rest of this entry »
Three months after the Gangnam style video, with slightly larger Korean male rolling his wrists and fist-pumping the air like a rodeo cowboy debuted, we are still talking about it. What exactly are the reasons for its incredible success? Indeed, you can’t really escape a viral video because it has a habit of cutting across stereotypes and demographics and consuming everything including client minds, largely because everyone likes a YouTube video that, in Gangnam’s case, has the potential to draw millions of viewers.
Virality itself is not an exact science with specific ingredients that need to be in place; rather, it has been said that the spread of viral phenomena can be regarded as part of the cultural politics of network culture or the virality of the age of networks, according to Tony Sampson in his “Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Contagion (University of Minnesota Press, 2012)”. According to Rob O’brien’s “ Asis Still Riding the Gagnam Wave” it’s “very, very funny,’ and “‘an ironic poke-in-the-eye of one of Seoul’s uber posh suburbs.” And of course timining matters: by luck or design, it just happens to be at the right time.
Viral marketing strategies are more accessible and more effective than ever. According to a recent MIT study, brands can increase the number of people who install their Facebook apps by 400% through a combination of private and newsfeed messaging.
One of the greatest advantages of Internet Viral marketing is that it allows for advertising and public alertness about website and company by generating a flow of traffic that has the potential to bring in masses of potential customers.
With some incentives, i.e. prizes, and some ingenuity and creative thought, a large number of people can be reached.
A short study on the web reveals that a hugely important factor for success in startup companies is finding ways to acquire customers at a low cost. The perfect business model would be viral customer acquisition with good monetization, according to David Skok. But only a small number of companies actually obtain the growth.
What exactly does it take to achieve viral growth and what are the key variables that drive it? It turns out there are two key parameters that drive how viral growth happens, the Viral Coefficient, and the Viral Cycle Time.
What we want to understand in these two models, is how the population of Customers changes over time. The first model that we will build looks in a very simple way at how viral growth works in the marketing world.