Is $0.00 Really The Cost of Viral Marketing
Last week I wrote two posts about ‘Free’ & Viral Marketing , the first was merely questioning whether free was necessary for viral 
marketing to work, the second simply shed some insight that came from discussing the first post with a prominent Kiwi Blogger. This is the follow up:
After all this discussion what was the consensus?
Free is not 100% necessary for viral marketing…but it sure does help.
‘Free’ certainly lowers the barriers which prohibit viral activity, but it’s likely that you can still have viral activity whilst charging a price. A somewhat obvious and simultaneously abstract example is the chain letter e.g. You send $10 to 25 friend asking them to do the same, in exchange for the prospect of thousands of dollars coming back to you, if both your 25 friend and some of their friends all do the same all of a sudden thousands of dollars have been exchanged in a viral interaction.
Ok not everyone will buy into this crapy form of scam marketing but it upholds the point that viral messages do spread even when the cost is not $0.00. Free is not necessarily a prerequisite for the viral effect, but tiz perhaps the ultimate acceleratant.
The fundamental idea behind viral marketing is that value of spreading a message must always be greater than the cost associated with spreading it. Which means that because there is always time involved in spreading a message, and time=$$$, the cost of spreading a message is never truly ‘free’. Therefore people will spread a message if the value of spreading it significantly out weighs the cost of spreading it. – Viral interaction’s natural foundation is value!
So perhaps instead of using $0.00 to gain the benefits of viral growth – you could focus on adding overwhelming value to reward sharing and reducing other costs (such as time).
If you’re looking for a great overview of viral marketing check out David Meerman-Scott’s white paper and if you’re interested in ‘Free’ then check out Wired Magazine’s Repository on $0.00. Oh and if you haven’t yet read it Chris Anderson’s book Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business is well worth a look, you can download the Free audiobook here.
Image sourced from: http://www.boozemonkey.com/blog