Viral marketing has generated a lot of excitement
recently, in part because it seems like the ultimate
free lunch: Pick some small number of people to seed
your idea, product, or message; get it to go viral; and
then watch while it spreads effortlessly to reach
millions. Unfortunately, for every high-profile example
of a successful viral product there are many more
attempts that fail. Reliably designing messages to
exhibit viral properties is extremely difficult, it
turns out, as is predicting which particular individuals
will be responsible for spreading them. Fortunately, it
is possible for companies to benefit from the insights
of viral marketing while avoiding its most serious
pitfalls. We propose an approach called big-seed
marketing, which combines viral-marketing tools with
old-fashioned mass media in a way that yields far more
predictable results than “purely” viral approaches like
word-of-mouth marketing. pdf
