Viral marketing - the impact of seeding strategies

I found this one page whitepaper through Viralmanager.com, which I discovered through an e-mail Chris Quigley from Rubberrepublic.com sent me, based on a comment on my post from last week on brand rumour tracking.

As you can see on the graph, there's a huge difference in seeding a viral marketing campaign through a mailinglist and seeding it in a natural way via blogs. Viralmanager.com sums up several reasons:

1. Sharp rise and fall of mailing list seeding: this is largely linked to the fact that mailing lists often don’t contain many “influencers”, the type of person who is more likely to pass on a campaign to friends.
2. Slower uptake of natural seeding: natural seeding often takes a while to take effect, due to the slow nature of seeding across a high number of key influencer blogs, communities etc.
3. Longer plateau of natural seeding: the plateau reflects the number of conversations going on about the campaign amongst communities. The length of the plateau is usually related to the amount of initial
   natural seeding.
4. Difference in height of the long tails: a naturally seeded campaign will usually have a much higher long tail than a mailing list only campaign. This is due to the amount of referrers generated through a naturally seeded campaign.

In the end they recommend to use both strategies at the same time in order to create a hit on the one hand and a longtail life on the other hand.

Link: http://www.viralmanager.com/strategy/research_docu...