This new video might be a cell phone commercial… or it might be an advertisement for a new video game (Valve?)… or it might be a film project…. or it might be something completely different? Time will tell!

“Viral Marketing exploits existing social networks by encouraging customers to share product information with their friends.”

It has been difficult, the authors say, to measure the accuracy of previous research highlighting the effectiveness of social networking in the adoption of a product. The effectiveness of recommendations however is something that they were able to study in this article!

Some Examples
Hotmail only spent about $50,000 on traditional marketing and still they managed to grow from 0 to 12 million users in a year and a half.

GMail captured a significant amount of the market share years later, despite being an “invite only” service.

A Lucid marketing study suggests that roughly 68% of individuals consult a friend or relative before making a home electronics purchase (which is more than the 50% that used search engines for similar research.)

The article also brings up an important variable in the viral chains. Initially, the chances that the customer will purchase a product will increase with additional recommendations coming in. However, a saturation point is reached. Once that point has been reached, the likelihood of a purchase will decline.

“In many epidemic models, it is assumed that as individual interact they have equal probability of being infected. Contrary to this, we observe that the probability of infection decreases with repeated interaction.”

Also, unlike many other “high traffic” nodes in common epidemic models (such as needle sharing or sexually transmitted diseases), it seems that in the research conducted here that the effectiveness of a person who is “high traffic” drops with the more recommendations they send out.

Digg

Digg is a website made for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the Internet, by submitting links and stories, and voting and commenting on submitted links and stories. Voting stories up and down is the site’s cornerstone function, respectively called digging and burying. Many stories get submitted every day, but only the most Dugg stories appear on the front page.

Fark

Fark.com is a community website created by Drew Curtis that allows users to comment on a daily batch of news articles and other items from various websites. It is one of the top 100 English language websites, receiving over 2,500 submissions a day and over 5 million unique visitors per month. It is frequently used as a humorous source on CNN, Fox News, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and many radio stations. It is generally seen as a destination for strange news stories and snarky commentary.

Facebook

Facebook, formerly The Facebook, is a free-access social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. Users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region to connect and interact with other people. People can also add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. The website’s name refers to the paper facebooks depicting members of a campus community that some US colleges and preparatory schools give to incoming students, faculty, and staff as a way to get to know other people on campus.

Youtube

YouTube is a video sharing website where users can upload, view and share video clips. Three former PayPal employees created YouTube in February 2005. In November 2006, YouTube, LLC was bought by Google Inc. for US$1.65 billion, and is now operated as a subsidiary of Google. The company is based in San Bruno, California, and uses Adobe Flash Video technology to display a wide variety of user-generated video content, including movie clips, TV clips, and music videos, as well as amateur content such as video blogging and short original videos. Most of the content on YouTube has been uploaded by members of the public, although media organizations including CBS and the BBC offer some of their material via the site.

Viral Video Chart

Note: All descriptions on this page taken from Wikipedia.