Viral Marketing and Two-way communication

In a recent article in HBR (Viral marketing for the real world) Duncan J. Watts and Jonah Peretti dives deep into on how to get Viral Marketing to work even if you don't get the viral part self sustaining. Which means that the reproduction rate is lower than 1 and that it will die eventually. However they launch the interesting idea to use viral marketing techniques to reach a wider audience than would otherwise have been possible. So combining the techniques of traditional mass marketing with viral marketing generates a much better result from the invested marketing dollars they conclude.

This sounds perfect and a pragmatic way into using a technology that is hard to master (getting the viral message loose IS hard). However I miss two things here. First of all you miss the opportunity to get to know the respondents of your mass marketing effort. They only send the message on, and you know as little as you did before. And the ones they send it to also are totally anonymous. Why not combine the mass marketing and viral marketing with permission based marketing. Take the opportunity to collect permissions when you have them interested. That way you can continue send marketing messages their way without having to be dependent on expensive mass marketing campaigns. You can then continue using viral techniques to repeat each marketing message sent to your collected group of permissions.

The next accelerator is to use digital services to actually foster viral tendencies in the target group. For each person the message is sent to they receive payment in form of digital services like Video-On-Demand, top-up of the pre-paid mobile account, etc.

This leads towards becoming ONE with your customers as expressed by Stefan Engeseth in his book ONE.