Organic, not Viral
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…”
March 18th, 2008 at 8:11 pm
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March 20th, 2008 at 3:22 pm
[...] email to me (see right) is a great example of organic (not viral) marketing, as they focus on providing value to me, not leveraging me to reach my [...]
May 21st, 2008 at 11:01 am
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June 24th, 2008 at 11:59 pm
[...] You’ve got to put some benefit in front of a request for participation. If you anticipate organic (don’t call it viral) growth, what are your users able to offer their friends and [...]