My WordCamp Notes: How to go Viral with Ben Huh (lolcats)

WordCamp SF presentation by Ben Huh creator of of icanhascheeseburger.com

Download the presentation slides for LOLcats and the Secret of Virality

Facebook is viral, but is it spam?

Why Facebook is spamming (you know all those emails you get from your friends telling you to sign up for the next latest app?)

• You can ONLY use these apps, if you invite a ton of people, then some will sign up and then you can use it
• They make you spam?
• It’s a serial process, you can’t just send to 1 person, your chances suck.
• So Facebook is addicted to invite based virality
• It gets in your system you send them, everyone clicks it, but then you get to the service and you realize it sucks.  Don’t be a dick.  It can only piss off your user.
• The Invite-Virality is not what you want. You want the slooower process that is sustainable and you wind up with users that LIKE YOU.

Invite-based pros and cons

Pros

• fast
• fast
• fast

Cons

• You are a virus - you just generated a negative experience for 99% of the people that add you
• churn and burn

Why are you on this site?

• I was suckered by an email
• OR I like this site enough to return to it
• “Too many people are flagging our emails as SPAM”. Uhh it is spam.

Sustainable and slow pros and cons

Pros

• Trust and goodwill
• Real traffic
• You’re not a digg
• Realistic return on value

Cons

• Slow.Er.
• Requires a quality product
• May not be possible

SPAM invites are the equivalent of telemarketing

Viral Coefficient can be changed so that teh # of invites occurs of the LIFETIME of the USER. Build reasons to invite.  Lolcats makes their photos available for use on their blogs. They don’t make them spam it.

Reasons for Inviting

• Create content
• Preferencing
• Personal Messages
• Comments - people want to be appreciated for their feedback.
• Feedback and Replies
• (Find reasons for your site)

Tracking Conversations

• Track a group of people (a cohort) that go through a particular process.  So maybe give cohort A one message and Cohort B another message. You measure the end result of each.
• Andrew Chen - runs a blog on virality
• The Loop.  Like ShareThis but from a marketing perspective, much prefer to have links. On engrishfunny.com they focused on just 6 big sharing buttons.  (They may change myspace to twitter eventually, but the key is to react to the conversation and the tools that are popular right now on the internet.)
• Friendfeed or microblogging has a real impact on how quickly your content gets out there.  Twitter lets you communicate with a very specific audience, so the conversion rates from Twitter are much higher.
• Detecting virals: WP Metrics - pageviews.  Put that page in analytics and reverse the curve. You can track over time. You will not get a single referrer if it’s viral. The true viral ones have no referrer because they were actually emailed from a friend.

Achieving viral virility means not being a dick.

How do you determine the stickies - the users that stick around with your site

They divide into Consumers and Contributors.  Have a genuine dialogue with the people who buy your product. Get them to tell you about reviews they’ve written, posts they’ve made about you etc. If you communicate with them and ask them how they feel, they will blog about it and give you more positive feedback.