What does virality mean for a brand? Does your brand need virality? Josh
Elman shares some expert tips about word
of mouth virality and what it can do to drastically change your business.
Summary transcription
Launch scaling it’s really like how do you get something working. How do you
get it scaling? How do we take this idea you have and make it something great?
Something that would be so great, that we would love to be a part of and
invest in and one of the things we talk about all the time is virality…
Every entrepreneur I meet wants their product to go viral…
How do I get one person to love my product so much that they tell more people?
When they tell more people, we’ll have this great thing that really starts
growing virally and scaling organically, that we aren’t spending lots on in
terms of marketing.
We’re really just able to get it in lots of people’s hands.
But I think that virality is one of the most misunderstood concepts out
there…
Everybody just thinks it’s easy to sprinkle a little bit of fairy dust on it,
and make it viral.
It never works that way. It’s not something that you can sprinkle on. It has
to be really inherent in your product.
We have to really understand virality… And why it is that people want to
spread your product in order to make it work.
There are different types of virality. But, there’s one fundamental thing that
I think is really important to understand:
Every time you really want something to go viral, what you’re really
looking for, is what I call inception.
Someone takes this cool idea and says ‘hey there’s this new product’ or, you
heard about it somewhere, or you got invited to it. Bottom line, there’s this
product that now does this new thing. I want to go and try it.
And then… You get virally infected by this idea.
You’re incepted with it. You then you love it so much that you then spread
it to other people too.
That’s the core concept of virality.
You want to focus on that moment of inception. What your product can
actually do, and get somebody so motivated that they want to try it.
Because, really when we think about virality, it is this combination of
inception plus I now know that this product exists, for enough motivation that
they really want to go give this product a shot.
That’s the overall thing to understand about virality, but not every product
is going to go viral in the same way…
Word of mouth virality: This is really the kind of peak virality that
everybody is so glad to have happened.
It’s when somebody loves your products so much all they can do is talk about
it with others.
People often ask, How can i engineer that? the first way to do that, is to
build a great product that gives people such a good experience. A good
example, is when google first came out in the early 2000s. It was clean and
simple, and gave good results. People would always say, “Have you tried
google”.
End
**Related: **Storytelling to make content go
viral
Also seeHow to get your ideas to
spread
Natasha Hoke was Upscope's head of marketing.
