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'Big-Seed' Marketing: WOM + Advertising Solution
Because of its low cost and extreme reach, viral marketing is a media darling. Reliably designing messages that spread virally, however, is hardly a cake walk. In their May 2007 Harvard Business Review article, titled "Viral Marketing for the Real World," Columbia University sociology professor Duncan J. Watts and Jonah Peretti, founding partner of the Huffington Post, assert that it's not only difficult to craft a trigger-ready viral message, but also to predict which individuals will reproduce the message.
Because of this challenge, Watts and Peretti contend that using viral marketing tools in conjunction with traditional advertising media, something they term "big-seed" marketing, will produce greater returns, even for a viral program that has a reproduction rate of fewer than one. Traditional advertising, the authors posit, has the potential to create enormous seeds, the burnout of which can last multiple generations.
Watts and Peretti allow that their big-seed methodology "lacks the mystique" of pure viral marketing, but offer it up as a solution to the sometimes precarious task of identifying and targeting influencers.
Learn more (Havard Business Review)
Learn more (Information Week)