Comments on: Responding to Rubel: Word of Mouth and the Tipping Point

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By: Daniel R

Daniel R — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 18:14:37 +0000

@Barce:
Thanks for sharing your Dogster experience.

There are definitely examples of “viral” content that maybe never really goes viral, but still delivers steady and dependable traffic. I’ve also seen examples of articles getting “Digged” 1 year after it was originally written.

@Ryan:

I think this quick fix is from management mantras of “long hanging fruit” and the need for “immediate return” – some that does not necessarily happen when it comes to building a genuine word-of-mouth viral campaign.

By: Barce

Barce — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 17:04:14 +0000

I worked on the breed personality quiz at Dogster and we kept viral metrics on it. The virality never hit over 1, which means the quiz isn’t viral, but thousands of people come to the quiz everyday. We started using word of mouth, and that soon died out, and then now, thanks to Google, we get a steady stream of people who search on “dog personality quiz”.

This makes me totally agree with the forest fire metaphor as being more accurate. In the petrie dish that is Facebook virality is great, but forest fires works more accurately in describing the Internet and its vast number of connections.

Also, I like how you define A listers and Word of Mouth. The problem is that the technology we have, like twitter, allows folks to prima facie conflate the two. For example, a total nobody can create the appearance that his word of mouth network is Michael Arrington, Om Malik, Dave McClure, Jeremiah Owyang because these folks aren’t always careful about who they friend.

By: Ryan Moede

Ryan Moede — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 13:22:16 +0000

Great post. It seems that too many are taking this as an either/or approach, instead of understanding that the influentials can be anyone, anywhere – simply to varying degrees. http://www.viget.com/engage/social-influencers-can-be-anyone-anywhere/