viral marketing - green business Photo credit: Dmitry Bairachnyi

David Meerman Scott:

I’ve identified six different things that you have to do to create something that people will be eager to share with one another.

This doesn’t guarantee that they will share, but is the six things that are elements of everything that people do want to share. We’ve all seen these things. A YouTube video that has one million hits or blog post that everybody has seen it. What they have is six things in common:

1. Nobody Cares About Your Products…

…except for you. Nobody cares about your products, and that’ a hard things for people to get around. But it’s true. If you write abut your products, people go: “Oh that’s boring, I’m going to go on to the next thing“.

2. Don’t Coerce People to Share

They’ll do it because they like it. You don’t have to convince them that they should share it, by doing some kind of game or making some kind of contest, or doing something that people will think: “I want to share this because if I do I might win something“. No, no coercion is required.

3. Lose Control of Your Information

The third thing is very counter-intuitive to people, and that is that you have to lose control of your information. Once it gets out there into the world, people would share it in the way that they want to, and you don’t have any control over that.

You don’t have any control over what they will say, and a lot of times, the bosses of the companies, don’t like that idea, because they’re so used to maintaining this control over their information. Yet, what makes things share is that you have to lose that control and let people share it.

4. Put Down Roots

In other words you have a home base somewhere on the Web, on a blog, on a podcast, somewhere where people can find you.

5. Create a Trigger

The fifth thing is: create a trigger that encourages people to share. Create something that is so compelling and so valuable that people say: “Damn, I need to share it” I call it a trigger.

A trigger could be a YouTube video, a really interesting blog post, it could be a really compelling piece of data.

6. Point The World to Your Virtual Doorstep

If you point people to the place where you provide something that then gets them to either buy your product, or get interested in what you’re doing. But ultimately, when you share things, you want to have a way that your readers can get back to the place that you can do business with them. To learn more about you, to read something else about you, buy your product if it’s an e-commerce, provide some personal information to get a personal call for you, if you do a business-to-business sort of consulting, or whatever.

Those are the rules. If you follow those rules you’re greatly increasing the chance that your thing will spread really far. If you don’t follow those rules, it doesn’t mean it will never spread, but it will be much more difficult to make it spread.

This article was reproduced from Robin Good’s article on viral marketing. The original full version can be found here