VIRAL LOOP Widget

Have you ever wondered how Web 2.0 stalwarts like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter and the rest grew so fast? They went viral, of course. To use their products induces you to spread them. (What’s the sense of being on Facebook or Twitter if none of your friends are?)

My forthcoming book, the VIRAL LOOP, looks at how many of today’s most successful companies are being built to facilitate viral growth. But don’t confuse all this with a viral marketing campaign, which may yield an impressive one-time cascade of online traffic. Viral loops by definition must be replicable and are engineered to grow at staggering rates—far beyond any viral ad or Mentos-Diet Coke video. Reproducibility, in turn, suggests anyone should be able test features of a viral loop.

This led me to realize that as a journalist, I had to do more than simply look at a company’s impressive growth. I needed to create a “proof of concept” to test my research, and in the process directly involve users. Because let’s face it: Facebook wouldn’t be worth billions if it weren’t for people like you. Since a viral loop assumes a level of user participation, not only is there room for users to examine their own roles, there’s an implicit invitation to third parties, like myself, to explore these relationships.

To that end, I teamed up with StudioE9 to develop a VIRAL LOOP widget. The widget is designed to manifest concepts illustrated in the book as well as educate users about where they fit in. In essence, it is a viral loop about a viral loop. As a kind of operational “fact checking” tool, transparency is important. And as business models become complex platforms I’m hoping this form of journalistic involvement will become more common.