5 Outrageously Clever Techniques That I Learned At The Mixergy Viral Forum

Posted on Sep 26, 2008 - 6:00 AM PST

On Monday, September 22, we did the Mixergy Viral Forum, and brought in experts to teach how any site can get more traffic by using viral marketing techniques. Here’s a recap of the event.

Speakers:

Otis Chandler – Founder, Goodreads (LinkedIn | Twitter | Goodreads)

Ethan Bauley – Dir. Social Meida Strategy, M80 (LinkedIn | Twitter)

Chris Bechtel – VP, iPressRoom (LinkedIn, Twitter)

Neil Patel – CTO, ACS (LinkedIn, Twitter)

Jason Nazar – CEO, Docstoc.com (LinkedIn, Twitter)

Some Pictures:

More pictures on Facebook.

5 Viral Techniques:

#1 “You Have NO Friends!” – If a site has a friends feature, Otis said it should integrate friends into every part of the site. That way, if a user doesn’t have any friends, she’ll keep seeing “you have no friends,” and will be persuaded to add them.

#2 Bribe Users – To get your viral marketing program going, Ethan suggested incetivizing users with bribes if they tell their friends.

#3 Hop The Bandwagon – When a story takes over the conversation online, Chris suggested incorporating it into your content. That way your site will get swept into the bigger conversation.

#4 Hire Monkeys – Neil revealed that he hired students (who he called “monkeys”) to pretend to be him on social networks. That helped him build an audience of people that he could market himself to.

#5 The Experiment – To illustrate how some of the ideas we discussed worked, Jason said that if anyone in the audience Twittered “You must follow @JasonNazar” he’d give them his Rolodex of bloggers. (See the results here.)

More, More More. We talked about many more techniques for making a site viral. These are just 5 of the most interesting ones that I wrote down.

Do you know of other ways to make a site viral? Add them to the comments or email them to me.

View Comments to “5 Outrageously Clever Techniques That I Learned At The Mixergy Viral Forum”

5 Outrageously bClever/b Techniques That I Learned At The Mixergy b…/b Says:
September 26th, 2008 at 6:52 am
[...] Andrew Warner wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptOn Monday, September 22, we did the Mixergy Viral Forum, and brought in experts to teach how any site can get more traffic by using viral marketing techniques. Here’sa recap of the event. Speakers: b…/b [...]
Sameer Says:
September 26th, 2008 at 12:26 pm
Andrew: I couldn’t make it. I message @JasonNazar but is it still possible to get the blogger list?
Robert Sanchez Says:
September 27th, 2008 at 2:08 pm
love the list, you have to be very careful about #2 on sites like Facebook (at least if you are trying to get an app viral); a carefully crafted bribe may work very well, but the company is cracking down on those ‘viral friend requests’
Ethan Bauley Says:
September 28th, 2008 at 6:10 pm
@robert sanchez

well, “bribe your users” isn’t quite what i said ;-)

the broader point about incentives is that marketers and software makers both need to put themselves in their target’s shoes and ask “why is it someone would think ‘i’d like to share this with someone i know?’”

if your answer is “because [product] is entertaining” or “because [product] is useful”, you’re not thinking deeply enough.

hth!
werutzb Says:
October 7th, 2008 at 10:06 pm
Hi!

I would like improve my SQL capabilities.
I red really many SQL books and would like to
get more about SQL for my work as oracle database manager.

What can you recommend?

Thanks,
Werutz