How Virality Works
I have lately been trying to understand how virality and WOM works. I know that if your service is compelling enough, many users will talk about you. But what I have been discovering in the last few weeks is that you can also structure your application, the flow etc in such a way that users are motivated to invite their friends.
Why would the users invite their friends? There could be a number of reasons
1. The place is more fun with friends around (orkut)
2. You may actually have some monetary benefits (such as makemytrip)
3. It may just help you unlock some features of the website (mostly applicable to facebook/opensocial apps)
There are a couple of interesting articles on the net …. I am trying to dig more information about this stuff … here is what I have found so far.
The Four Viral App Objectives (a.k.a., “Social network application virality 101″)
I was amazed to find out that stanford actually had a class on facebook apps last fall
As I work towards building an opensocial app (followed by a facebook app) for Muziboo.com, I will be posting more stuff on applications, virality etc. If you have some resources, please leave them as comments and I will update the list with them
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