Robust viral marketing activity is one of the hallmarks of a successful website or web application.

The idea behind most websites is to attract traffic, and then “convert” this traffic via one or more goals. Common examples of conversion goals include purchases, signups, or pageviews.

To bring traffic in the door, website owners try to rank well in search engines, but also frequently advertise via traditional media channels such as television or print, as well as online channels such as pay-per-click (PPC) or banner ads.

Viral marketing is an important way to bring in more traffic and increase the chances that this traffic will convert. To be clear: I’m not just talking about viral marketing for kids… I am talking about viral marketing for your business.

What is viral marketing?

At its core, viral marketing involves people spreading the word about a product, service, or company simply because they feel like sharing. It’s called “viral” because it mimics the way in which viruses and other pathogens spread through a population purely as a result of individuals going about their daily business.

If you’re a website owner, viral marketing lowers costs, increases revenue, and builds brand value. Viral marketing accomplishes these business goals by:

• side-stepping expensive advertising campaigns,
• introducing a steady stream of new potential customers, and (most importantly)
• leveraging a highly trusted resource—family and friends—to advocate on your behalf.

How does viral marketing work?

The genius of the common cold virus lies in its ability to constantly re-use the RNA (ribonucleic acid) that makes you sick. It accomplishes this by coating its RNA in a protein shell, or capsid, which features an ever-evolving surface structure that effectively camouflages the viral RNA from your body’s immune system. This bit of protomeric trickery forces the immune system to treat the virus as a wholly new threat each time… resulting in a delay of sufficient length to allow the virus to infect another host before your immune system has killed it.

Unlike the common cold, viral marketing on the Internet is all about adding extra information to content (as opposed to camouflaging), which makes it easier to classify, label, categorize, re-use, and share. This extra information makes garden-variety content into intelligent content.

Making your content intelligent: just add context

In a recent presentation, Salim Ismail put the issue of context fairly succinctly, and it went something like this: If you think of content as the “what”, context is the “who”, “where”, “when”, and in some cases, the “why”.

Unless this information is structured in some universal, open, standardized format (XML, for example), the value of your content will be severely diminished. Why? Because it can’t be shared as easily as your competitors’ content.

Let’s look at an example:

Imagine there’s a person talking about Web Accessibility somewhere in the world.

Valuable information? Maybe.

Now suppose this person is an industry expert and is giving a presentation in Denver this Monday afternoon at 2pm.

Now imagine that your organization provides Web Accessibility consulting, and one of your potential customers’ bosses just told them to find out more about complying with federal accessibility standards by next Tuesday. And this potential customer happens to live and work in Denver. If that potential customer could somehow get a hold of this information, it would literally be like putting a little lump of gold in their pocket. People like gold in their pocket (trust me).

You turn your content into pocket-sized lumps of gold by standardizing it, and you put it in people’s pockets by allowing it to be easily shared. I’m not just talking about LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace. I’m talking about industry blogs. I’m talking about Google. I’m talking about email, RSS, text messaging, Microsoft Word documents, PDF documents, and printed documents (yes, the ones that kill trees!). I’m talking about viral marketing for business.

Remember: If your customer base is not sharing in your organization’s events, opportunities, and branding message; they are sharing in your competitors’ events, opportunities and branding message—including your competitors’ opinions of your products and services.

The future of intelligent content on the web

Contrary to the hopes and dreams of some, increased Internet bandwidth has not resulted in the universal acceptance of bloated, graphics-heavy, non-semantic website design. In recent years our industry has seen an explosion in the number and variety of browsing devices—which make building to Web Standards critical. In addition, the far-flung places from which people demand Internet connectivity means web content must be more semantic, structured, and granular than ever… ensuring people get (only) what they want, when they want it.

Intelligent content isn’t just about structuring and tagging. Truly intelligent content facilitates the precise measurement of peoples’ consumption of that content, and allows website owners to maximize viral (and other beneficial) activity based on the data collected.

The human side of this is reasonably simple: If you know that your articles on “hiring technical staff” are shared at twice the rate of your articles on “open source databases”, you’ll probably start writing more articles about hiring technical staff.

The technical side is a bit trickier, but offers the potential for much larger returns. Building a website infrastructure that can measure traffic patterns and viral activity—and optimize the conversion flow based on this data—confers an incredible competitive advantage to its owners. This is viral marketing for business, and it begins with intelligent content.