“People have a tendency to overestimate the short-term consequences of the new social media technologies, and underestimate the long-term consequences.” – New Media Summit 2007

HBR IdeaCast interviewed Duncan Watts recently about some of his latest research into viral marketing .. it's a quick sketch that's worth a listen (if you can ignore the terrible sonic backdrop) and a read, as well as Walter Carl’s critique..

In brief, Watts is pointing out some of the limitations of marketers borrowing too heavily from the world of epidemiology when describing viral marketing campaigns, particularly the “reproduction rate” – that is, the rate of propagation of a virus from one carrier to another, described as a number between zero and one.. where 1 is the so-called “epidemic threshold” (aka malcolm gladwell’s “tipping point” in social terms). Any virus (or marketing message) propagating at a rate of 1 or greater is self-sustaining, anything below 1 is going to fizzle out eventually.

As we know, viral marketing is unpredictable and hard to do right – but Watts observes that taking a “Big Seed” approach – infecting a larger number initial of hosts with your marketing message – still produces desirable results even where propagation is considerably below 1..

The takeaways here for cultural marketers are:

:: a more precise language for describing viral marketing’s limits and opportunities to anxious ED’s and Boards,
:: a framework for planning and budgeting for viral marketing campaigns, and
:: new web applications for adding viral components to existing campaigns - and for measuring success.

More soon on how I’m working these frameworks into my own campaigns..