Viral Reputations and How They Spread

June 28, 2010 - PRLog -- If you own a computer with an internet connection (and the chances are that if you are reading this you do) and you reside in the western hemisphere, you are probably aware of YouTube. It would be a safe bet, if you are aware of YouTube, that you are also aware of an entertaining little phenomenon called “Rick-rolling”. The idea of it is simple – a user of a video site posts a video that looks as though it is worth watching (perhaps a movie trailer or the music video of a popular song) but makes sure that when a user clicks on it they are taken to a video of Rick Astley’s “Never gonna give you up”. It’s a ridiculous joke, but it led to Astley’s song scoring millions of “hits” on YouTube, directly leading to a large number of TV interviews for the recently obsolete 80s artist. ...So why does this happen? The mathematical principle that led to Rick Astley becoming a YouTube hit can be used as a powerful tool to promote your business and safeguard its reputation. This article will tell you about harnessing that tool, and will talk about how you can prevent it working against you!
It works like this. Firstly, imagine that someone has the flu. By hanging around with three people, the virus is passed on to them. The next day, these three people do the same thing, passing on their illness to three more people each. The day after that, all the newly infected people infect another three people each – and so it goes on, branching out. Infecting three people per day might take five seconds, but when everybody does it the virus undergoes what is known as “exponential growth”. Believe it or not, if this goes on for thirteen days then over 1.5 million people will have been infected.
Good internet marketing (and bad internet publicity) can work in the same way as a viral infection – and when it does it is described as “viral content”. Viral content can certainly work to your advantage, and what most intelligent online marketing programs aim for is to create content that people will want to share with one another (one person sharing it with a few people, and then those people sharing it to other people, just like the example above!) Similarly, it has been known to happen that viral content can turn negative and impact sales and market share for companies in a bad way. To prevent bad press, which might lead to a bad reputation, many successful businesses choose to invest in reputation management.
Don’t lose business. If you need help with reputation management, help is at hand! Click here to talk to us today about making your reputation bullet-proof.
Also, if you found this article interesting, you may also want to take a look at “Contractual Respect” and “A Second Chance to Make a First Impression”! You can find lots of other great articles about reputation management on this site – or, if you are interested, you can contact us now for some more information. Let us see how we can make your business more successful with a better online reputation.



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