Doesn’t matter if we’re talking about search, marketing, or web 2.0… organic is the new viral. A viral campaign uses its hosts to its own ends usually increasing attention to a particular web site.

An organic campaign nourishes the hosts (or network nodes), and gains the social ‘word-of-mouth’ hyper-growth as the result of its direct benefit to the host.  In fact, organic is not just about a marketing campaign, but should be integral in the design of the product in the first place, reducing the need for flashy or creative marketing.

Take Facebook and LinkedIN as examples. Whether I’m reading the digerati or talking to close colleagues, professionals have become weary of widget spam on Facebook, because the widgets are noise, not signal. But new features from LinkedIN actually provide benefit to professionals, and are therefore quickly adopted.  In this comparison, Facebook is viral, LinkedIN is organic.

Here’s the summary one-liner from Google Search Guru and former Technorati CTO Kevin Marks’ blog Epeus’ epigone:

I spent the last weekend fighting off a flu virus, partly by eating lots of organic fruit. I expect social networks and their users will continue to do the same.

A good friend, John Siewierski, said this to me another way a few weeks ago, “think about what you are doing for your network, not what your network is doing for you.” Pretty organic, John.

“Ask not, what your country can do for you…”