Designing for Viral Growth
Monday, April 21st, 2008
How do I design a concept, message or product that rapidly spreads by word-of-mouth “like a virus”? Idea viruses, viral videos, viral marketing and even viral business models are a central topic in cognitive design. A lot of ink has been spilled on seeding with influencers, the necessity of remarkable content, making sharing easy and rewarding and always asking permission.
All of this pales though when you have a good product, it’s free and sharing is required to activate its core functionality.
This is part of the message that Gina Bianchini delivers about her company Ning, in the May cover story of Fast Company.
Ning helps you to create a social network around any topic you like for free. How cool is that? Clearly, if I am going to make my social network go, I must invite (or share it with) others who in turn can set up their own and invite (or share it with) others and so on. This is a great example of a product that has a built in viral feature – must share it to get value out of it.
Unlike most other social networks Ning has a built in revenue model – Google ads. Or if I want to avoid the ads I can pay a small monthly fee. How smart is that?
From a cognitive design perspective, the success of Ning, leaves us with a pressing question: How can we create share-dependent versions of traditional products and services to get viral effects?
