Big seed marketing

Lately viral marketing has become a big fad for all the marketer's and the new ventures, the idea behind viral marketing is pretty simple you pick a small number of influential people and if reproduction rate R(new infections/no. of seeds) is greater than 1,the message spreads through an exponential rate and reaches a tipping point,just like a virus in an epidemic.

The real difficulty lies in actually implementing this strategy,many people have failed to simulate the epidemic becuase it is extremely difficult to find those groups of influential people who form the base for the epidemic.There was an article in May '07 issue of Harvard Business Review,Viral marketing for the real world, where in Duncan J. Watts and Jonah Peretti talks about a new variation of viral marketing, the Big seed marketing.


Big seed marketing alleviates the difficulty in simulating the epidemic by using the conventional mass advertising to create a large initial seed(I) for the campaign and here even if the reproduction rate R<1 ,the total number of infections(I/(1-R)) is much better to using just the viral marketing.The authors pointed out that many companies have successfully implemented the big seed campaigns using an open source software called ForwardTrack.