Social Networking Potential

Viral marketers have developed a concept called “Social Networking Potential” or SNP, which is a quantitative measurement of how much influence a particular individual has on others. Viral markerters target their campaigns at high SNP individuals in an attempt to increase the reach of their campaigns.

Seth Godin called these people sneezers. Sneezers are the people who when they see something cool or interesting, they send an email to their friends and say “look at this”. Or they post it to their blog. These people aren’t passing these ideas along as a business or for any nefarious purpose. They simply want to pass good things around to their friends, and because they have consistently sent good, or funny, or interesting things in the past, they are highly trusted sources.

Obviously there are people who try to be sneezers, who end up looking like spammers to their friends. There’s always the one friend who always forwards every email they receive on to other people, even if they’re not funny or interesting, and people have learned to automatically delete their email or have a filter in place to get it into a separate folder or something. Some people go so far as to tell their friend not to email them so much. That’s an untrusted friend as far as viral marketing goes.

And then there is always the compromised sources. Obviously if you give people an incentive (financial or functional) to send recommendations on to their friends, those recommendations carry less weight but can still be quite effective. An example of this is the Facebook application called SuperPoke. The more times you poke people, the more things you can achieve in the application. If you poke 2 people, you become level 2 and can then do a few more actions to them. If you poke 3 more people after that, you go to level 3. In that way, the application actually rewards you for trying to spread the application virally – it rewards you for using it. And that activity helps spread the application to more people. It’s not naturally viral, as much as rewarding viral behavior.

Another type of compromised source (but still quite powerful) would be public web sites such as Boing Boing or TechCrunch. These sites are under pressure to post articles every day (several per day), and so they are not really filtering too much content. It’s like when you see a report on CNN about the woman who’s dog saved her life by barking for help. It’s a slow news day, and some junk gets through. But still getting mentioned on CNN, Boing Boing or TechCruch still would do a great job helping a viral marketing campaign succeed.

So what’s my SNP value? I don’t know. But if any marketers want to talk to me about writing about their viral campaigns, drop me an email. My SNP is small enough that I don’t have a ton of marketers trying to talk to me. On second thought, maybe that’s a good thing…