A neat viral marketing concept
Went to a TechHub workshop about viral marketing on Thursday and liked it to the extent I wanted to write a quick post about it. Toby Beresford has developed a simple framework for viral marketing which he calls this the petal model.
In a nutshell, there are four kinds of viral loops. First there is direct viral loop (inviting friends) vs. indirect viral loop (eg. leaderboard that everyone sees). A Farmville example of an active loop is sending someone a tomato plant as a gift, a passive loop is coming to Farmville for the first time and seeing your friends there with nice farms.
The other dimension is positive loop (what do I get if i return every day/week) vs negative loop (what will go wrong if I don’t come back). In farmville positive is getting a crop, and negative is when your plants dry because you haven’t watered them.
Like petals on a flower there is no limit to how many viral loops your product or service may have. No rocket surgery here, but I thought this is a really good framework for hanging your viral loop ideas onto, and seeing whether you had missed any of the loop type for your app or campaign.
I’m looking forward to beta testing Pailz, Toby’s new project, which should have all the differents loops covered. Especially as it’s a business app, not some Facebook game with raison d’être just to kill as many hours as humanly (or robotly?) possible.