So, what makes SXSW viral.  Wow…. what doesn’t make it viral. That list it too small.  Let’s start with what makes it viral: free food, free music, phenomenal up and coming music, blogs & SiriusXMU exposing you to bands beforehand, the free parties that are impossible to get into unless you RSVP in advance, the new ventures that lanch and reinforce their product as the week goes on.  It’s hard not to have some word spread into your ear about some band or some show.

The biggest takeaway is that everyone is OPEN to viral marketing at this event.  This is probably one of the only events I know about that has such a large volume of people are overtly acceptable to being exposed to viral marketing.  It’s a part of the SXSW culture.

So, if you want to launch your viral marketing product, go to an event where people are expecting it.  Go where the cool people are.  And give them stuff for free that they really want.  Then, just maybe, they’ll talk about you.  Good luck!

The question of whether your site, product, or service is inherently viral is an important one.  Can you construct it so that it is?  Well, in many cases the answer is yes, but it typically takes some thinking through before it can become viral.  The incentive really needs to be there for someone to tell their friend, and the “payment” needs to be something other than money.  For example, your experience with the service needs to get better when you have more people within your network using it.  Otherwise, people don’t really care about telling their friends unless they’re the few who tell everyone.  Getting to those people can be challenging, and although that’s important to get initial traction for your business, I would argue that you need more mass appeal to reach a “tipping point”.

- Ryan Pitylak

Matt Deangelis writes about how social bookmarks are on of the tools for spreading word about your product or service virally.

Social bookmarking sites allow users to create a set of content bookmarks. These bookmarks are organized by tags, which are (usually) arbitrary words or phrases the user can assign to content. This gives the user a way to classify, rank and organize content using tags. The most popular Social Bookmarking Site is del.ici.ous, which has millions of users.

What is the strategy for bookmarking your site?

1. Write good content that people like to bookmark, such as lists, how-to’s, technical articles and humor.
2. Provide people with the tools to bookmark your content, such as the following bookmarking websites, such as del.icio.us, Listible, Digg, StumbleUpon, BlinkList, Spurl, Magnolia, Furl, BlogMarks, and Reddit.  There are also a lot more social bookmarking sites out there, so do your research and make sure you provide your users with the tools for the bookmarking sites that match your content.

Viral marketing is a tool which most businesses should use in their online marketing. Contrary to the traditional method of promoting their business and products, companies use viral marketing that encourages clients to create forums, blogs, and reviews. Businesses that understand the importance of these viral marketing strategies receive more opportunities to be found by new customers.

There are multiple ways to create viral marketing success.  The first strategy is to write compelling articles that will be picked up by third parties.  For example, if you write an article that is relevant to a targeted blog or site, you can contact that website, give them permission to use the article, and request a link back to you in exchange for the use of the article.  This adds content to their website, which helps their community, seo position, and overall website value.  You benefit from cross-over traffic to your website and from seo link value.

One of the primary goals with the article exchange strategy is to have your article tagged by users on the major bookmarking websites.  Examples include del.icio.us, digg.com, and technorati.com.  You must write content compelling enough to be organically tagged by these bookmarkers.  If your content is really compelling, it can result in a lot of links, which will later result in a lot of cross-over traffic.

Another viral marketing strategy is to reach out to the blogger community and let these bloggers know about your product or service.  This is a particularly sensitive topic, because these bloggers receive many product and service review requests.  Unlike the local media publications, which have a system in place to take new content, most bloggers do not have the systems to handle the massive number of review requests they receive.  Due to this inundation, they can become irritated if you continuously bug them about your product or service.  You must understand their blogging style, the topics they blog about, and an explanation of why your product or service is relevant and important to their community.

iMedia Connection’s Media Strategies Editor Jim Meskauskas wrote about social networks and viral marketing.  He offered four items that good viral marketing campaigns share:

• Entertainment: the marketing is entertaining.
• Utility: what is being marketed is something the reader can use.
• Palpable reward: the marketing provides instant gratification.
• Uniqueness: the marketing is like nothing the reader has ever seen.

He also describes the difference between frictionless and active viral marketing campaigns. Frictionless occurs when the audience spreads the good word via usage, such as Hotmail. Active viral marketing occurs when the audience spreads the word via actively recruiting non-audience members into the audience.

So, make a fun application that people will want to use, tell their friends about, and use.  Find a way to increase your brand awareness using from this tool, and potentially drive cross-over traffic to your website.

Pete Blackshaw asks some good questions that any company seeking to perform viral marketing should address:

• Are we nurturing or compromising the integrity of trusted consumer-to-consumer conversations? Are marketer-designed word-of-mouth programs helping or hurting?
• Are we sufficiently transparent in the way we message with consumers in the so-called “trust zone”? If we’re not, what’s the risk and associated cost?
• If we use incentives to drive word-of-mouth, are there important disclosure obligations? Should a more rigorous disclosure standard apply to younger consumers and/or their parents?
• Why even consider offering incentives to consumers when viral brand enthusiasts are already sitting in our corporate opt-in database? Maybe we just need to retool our segmentation models.
• If things go wrong, who’s accountable: the brand group, the agency, or the viral marketing firm?

1. Gives away products or services

“Free” is the most powerful word in a marketer’s vocabulary. Most viral marketing programs give away valuable products or services to attract attention. Free e-mail services, free information, free “cool” buttons, free software programs that perform powerful functions but not as much as you get in the “pro” version.

2. Provides for effortless transfer to others

Viral marketing works famously on the Internet because instant communication has become so easy and inexpensive. Digital format make copying simple. From a marketing standpoint, you must simplify your marketing message so it can be transmitted easily and without degradation. Short is better.

3. Scales easily from small to very large

To spread like wildfire the transmission method must be rapidly scalable from small to very large. The weakness of the Hotmail model is that a free e-mail service requires its own mail servers to transmit the message. If the strategy is wildly successful, mail servers must be added very quickly or the rapid growth will bog down and die. If the virus multiplies only to kill the host before spreading, nothing is accomplished. So long as you have planned ahead of time how you can add mail servers rapidly you’re okay. You must build in scalability to your viral model.

4. Exploits common motivations and behaviors

Greed drives people. So does the hunger to be popular, loved, and understood. The resulting urge to communicate produces millions of websites and billions of e-mail messages. Design a marketing strategy that builds on common motivations and behaviors for its transmission, and you have a winner.

5. Utilizes existing communication networks

Social scientists tell us that each person has a network of 8 to 12 people in their close network of friends, family, and associates. A person’s broader network may consist of scores, hundreds, or thousands of people, depending upon her position in society. A waitress, for example, may communicate regularly with hundreds of customers in a given week. Learn to place your message into existing communications between people, and you rapidly multiply its dispersion.

They observe the propagation of recommendations and the cascade sizes, which we explain by a simple stochastic model. They analyze how user behavior varies within user communities defined by a recommendation network. Product purchases follow a ‘long tail’ where a significant share of purchases belongs to rarely sold items.

They establish how the recommendation network grows over time and how effective it is from the viewpoint of the sender and receiver of the recommendations.

While on average recommendations are not very effective at inducing purchases and do not spread very far, they present a model that successfully identifies communities, product, and pricing categories for which viral marketing seems to be very effective.