Check out what Marketing Profs had to say about viral marketing. For once, the math looks right. 10 people tell 5, or a million tell 500K. So many expect the opposite – 5 people to tell ten each.
I also liked Dunay’s reference to Duncan Watts’ theory, also noted in Site’s Random Acts of Social Marketing post of a few months ago. Watts says it’s the network itself, not any individual contributor that makes the most difference in the successful spread of a virus. Today on MarketingProfs, Dunay rightly cites not the message content, not the viral mechanism, but the network properties of the “bored at work” segment as the determining agent in the spread of a meme.
Although, message content that includes information about a public figure with a personality disorder (Perez Hilton, W., etc.) does help!