The Flow of Viral Video
Information Spreads Like a Viral Epidemic
Are You a 'Fast Forwarder' or an Information Slowpoke?
"Most of us know people in our departments or company who are very, very active, and some who take a long time to respond," Moro said.
In a paper to be published in Physical Review Letters, Moro determined how "fast forwarders" and information slowpokes decide the fate of the latest funny YouTube cat video, chain mail hoax, or juicy bit of Aston Kutcher gossip.
He teamed up with Jose Luis Ibarren, the head of IBM's European e-marketing division, to design a real-world viral marketing experiment, a campaign that awarded a raffle ticket for a laptop to users who referred friends to a newsletter subscription.
Carried out in 11 countries and ultimately reaching more than 30,000 people, the experiment gave Moro the data to create a detailed model of viral information flow.
He discovered that information is caught in a tug-of-war between hyper-connected users and those who let emails languish in their inbox.
Getting to the Tipping Point
A piece of information goes viral if each infected person quickly spreads the email, video, or gossip to at least one other person.
"If you are infected and infect someone else, the number of people this 'someone else' will infect … is the number that tells you whether the campaign or infection will be alive in the second round or not," Moro said. "As long as the fast forwarders who first get wind of the news spread it to more people than originally heard it, it's over the tipping point."
"If you're above the tipping point, the message not only spreads out to a large fraction of people of society, but [does so] in a matter of hours," Moro said. "Not because the message is important, but because the more active people are the ones driving the information diffusion."
This results in a viral phenomenon like the videos of Susan Boyle singing on Britain's Got Talent, which reached 47.7 million people in less than a week.
About 90 percent of viral marketing campaigns fail to reach this tipping point, but they're often cost-effective because they may continue to spread, although at a much more casual pace. Below the tipping point, slowpokes take the reins, as they have in the case of the Veuve Cliquot champagne hoax.
Moro's experimental campaign lasted two months after the original emails were sent; his model predicted it would persist for a year if he maintained the website supporting the campaign.
But companies who want to use viral marketing to keep costs down, Moro said, should decide quickly whether to kill a campaign or keep it alive.
