The news of wildfires spreading in New Mexico this week affects me greatly - not only is New Mexico a unique window on nature's habitat: deserts, sand dunes, majestic mountains, unique birds, plants and panoramic skies - it is a place where I've spent many summers with my family mountain biking, hiking, and rafting. I trust in the experts working around the clock to prevent these wildfires from spreading to populated areas.
Editor's note: Margot Heiligman is an employee of SAP. SAP is a sponsor of The Social Customer.
While the fires are a common occurrence in the southwest United States, it leads me to a strong global business parallel: the concept of how content spreads like wildfire in our marketing pursuits.
We strive to produce marketing campaigns that "go viral" and we - or our advocates, even better - create content with the objective of virality; "going viral" is mission accomplie. Or is it?
According to new findings by Sinan Aral, Assistant Professor, and Dylan Walker, Research Scientist, both from the NYU Stern School of Business, in a research paper which is forthcoming in Management Science, viral products may be more effective than viral marketing when it comes to promotion. This may put into question whether viral marketing can be pre-engineered given the desired outcome: adoption.
According to Aral and Walker, what this means for promotion is that even passive viral features, such as social recommendation engines on Amazon or automated notifications like iTUNES Ping, when added to a digital product, increases the size of the adoption map. And when both passive and active viral features are added to a product, adoption is ten times greater than with traditional banner ads, and twice as effective as email campaigns.
I've found this to be effective from my own experience - partnering with SocialMediaToday.com on blogger outreach to share our embedded offer or "product" - which was an online community membership. We found nearly identical results.
Companies achieving this adoption with viral products today are Groupon, LivingSocial, or Google's beta products, for example. Peer to peer influence is the conduit; companies that are able to incorporate passive and active viral features across the viral product landscape can build a loyal customer base and spread the word about a product, like wildfire. This month's Harvard Business Review has an adoption map and shows the results of Aral and Walker's fascinating work.