After I took out the pitcher it made me tear apart some stickers saying when the pitcher would expire and put them on the outside of it. Now on July 14th at 7pm I need to replace the water filter. Then the light bulb went off in my head about virality in that getting a higher conversion is really about making the user commit to something and then asking for what you want!

How can you apply this to your site? Let’s take a look at Quizzes:

1- How Sex & the City are you? You click the quiz from somewhere and then fill out 25 questions. (I hope I am like Samantha)
2- Then it says to find out your results please compare yourself to 4 friends. Damnit, I don’t want to bug them but I’ve already spend time doing this so I will.
3- You find out you are like Charlotte. Bummer, but now the viral loop has started and you are on to the races.

Take away:
1- Think about how you can allow users to access / use your service before you want them to do anything.
2- The faster you can on-board (getting them into the core of your product) the more likely they are to stick around. As long as your product doesn’t suck.
3- When you agree to something or put time into it you are more likely to come back. Retention increases virality (more on that later). Think about World of Warcraft people who’ve spent 20 hours getting to level 49.a, when levels 50-60 come out, do you think they are going to do it?

I decided last night to finally give to Obama because they sent me an email saying that my donation would be matched by someone else, and I love matching funds. But I didn’t realize they were going to literally match me with someone, but then [they] showed me who had matched my donation and gave me a chance to send her a personal note, and I could even have them show her my email address in case we wanted to continue the conversation.

I liked the idea so much that when they sent my confirmation email with a link letting me become a matching donor, I jumped at the chance. They instantly got me to double my original contribution, and I even got a note at 3 AM from a guy in LA, the one whose donation I matched, thanking me and telling me that he’d never contributed to a political campaign before.

The whole system is such a great representation of him not just connecting people, but using simple technology so smartly. And you know I’m gonna vote for a guy who hearts technology.

This post was written by Andrew Warner.

After she finished her order, the Web site asked Olivia to dedicate the given pair. She dedicated the pair to her best friend. Her best friend got an email about the shoes and TOMS do-gooder message went viral.

Takeaway: You are not referring a friend but “dedicating” your shoe to people who now have the opportunity to buy that shoe and again dedicate there shoes…and the spreading goes on.

This post was written by Andrew Warner of Mixergy.

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• MySpace used their ResponseBase email marketing list of 100 million+ people to send for first users.
• Facebook spammed all the Harvard email lists to get the first 2,000 users in a day.
• Hi5 used their previous dating site to send a considerable amount of traffic to
• Bebo used their original site BirthdayAlarm.com to have a huge user base to start with.
• Friendster and Orkut, I think started naturally and virally through a very limited invite system.

Take aways:
1- What can you do to get a relevant email list through non-illegal ways? Can you create a light weight system to garner targeted users? Consider having a landing-page and buying ads on Google…
2- Things don’t happen by magic. You have to light a match to start a fire.

Leech Method: This is creating a viral system on the back of a system that has a crap load of people.

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Examples:

• Paypal auto-inserts into eBay.
• Facebook apps on the back of Facebook
• Google being used to power Yahoo & AOL (Not really viral but leech method)
• YouTube creating video flash embeds on MySpace
• Slide creating instant bulletin posts on MySpace as well.

Currently, many sites encourage people to email their friends and with fingers-crossed those users may come to their site. The leech method goes to the most popular party in the city and starts infecting people there.

What are other sites still available to leech on?

Update: If you are interested in gaming you should check out Charles Hudson’s Social Gaming Summit. He even gave Okdork Readers 15% off.

Add-on: This is the generic “idea” of virality that many people use.

Natural: This is where the process of inviting, growing and spreading your site is the fun/natural way of growing it. As well, the virality coefficient or growth should be much greater than an add-on site. What are some examples of this?

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- Friends for Sale on Facebook. You want to buy and sell your friends and play that game. And in the process you are inviting more and more people through that experience.
- Paypal. I sent you $45 via email. Heck yes, you are going to create an account and accept that money.
- Virtual teams like Manager Zone. You are not inviting your friends, you are recruiting your team members to play on your team.

Bottom Line: It’s like adding a Ferrari engine to a Honda. It’s still a Honda. Try to think of ways that people want to compare with another, choose their friends not invite and it’s a natural part of the part process.

What are other examples of natural virality?

Basically on every page that you have a registration button you should pull what page they are on when they registered. As well, you can track their path using Goals on Google Analytics or Apache logs. Let’s look at how LinkedIn does it:

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How does this affect virality and what can you do?

- If you can increase your conversion of registrants 10% by improving the flow of their registration or how they get to the registration that can make a HUGE difference.
- See which pages are avoided. Cut them out.
- Use Google optimizer to test pages and increase your conversion metrics by testing text, images, buttons and more…

When I did user testing at Mint.com and at Facebook it was amazingly interesting to see how regular people get to the pages compared to my own usage. Data > Opinions.

What else do you think you can do with this data?

Not Viral Model

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10 people join your site *
10 invites sent per person sent *
10% of those people convert to new users =
10 new users to the site

10 new users / 10 original = 1 viral coefficient / virality level (whatever you want to call it)

Viral means that for every person that joins they bring at least more than themselves. It’s kind of like going on a group date with 1 other person. Viral grows in pairs.

Viral Model

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10 people join your site *
15 invites per person sent *
10% of those people convert to new users =
15 new users to the site

15 new users / 10 original = 1.5 viral coefficient / virality level

General Viral Formula
X * Y = virality level / viral coefficient

Things you can do to make viral:

improve x: figure out a way to get them to send more invites. Or return more times to be able to invite more often.
increase y: work on ways the recipient is more likely to accept an invite.

Anyways, I will highlight some marketing techniques incorporating viral that we can all learn from.

1- Gender. They show me hot women of different races. How do they know I really prefer type X. I registered as male, that’s why they do this.
2- This is a retention play since I haven’t been to the site in x days. It’s a timed email.
3- The url is tracking my every click or not. a) did I open the email. They know this cause the image loads or not. b) which picture did I click on c) which link did I click on
4- Personal. Customized subject line. noah, meet people faster than ever
5- Action. After I click a link they dropped me on a page with all users that are online. Yay, I can real time talk to other people now.

Hockey stick growth = viral