getting viral nowit’s never too late

siqi chenserious business, inc

alexander lesiqi chen

in the beginning, was awesome

then not so awesome

“... the barrier to going viral on Facebook is exponentially higher ...meaning that exponential growth of the sort seen by the first few dozen apps on Facebook is nearly impossible.”

“... the barrier to going viral on Facebook is exponentially higher ...meaning that exponential growth of the sort seen by the first few dozen apps on Facebook is nearly impossible.”

June 2007

numbers

10,000,000 pages / day

5,000,000 users

700,000 users daily

80,000 new users / day

2 people

10 days (part time)

4 months ago

$0 marketing

adapti. make applications, not widgets

ii. deeply integrate the social graph

iii. innovate on incentives and psychology

iv. refocus on metrics, a:b testing

widgetslive on tiny boxes in profile pages

simple, limited feature set and content

implement trivial interactions

applicationsself contained within canvas pages

are full featured and expansive

implement interesting interactions

friends for sale

profiles of expensive (cute) people

walls, comments, gifts, pokes

newsfeeds, minifeeds, economics

integrating social data

go beyond mass invites -

‘natively embed’ social data -

create new interactions and viral channels

engaging

profiles, rankings, economics

commenting, gifting, poking

surf for cute people

incentives & psychology

social designreciprocation, scarcity, social proof

incentive designgame mechanics, economics, currencies

metrics for virality

for every new user

how many new users do they convert?

> 1.0 is good

virality in depth

for each new user, track:

# of invitations # of notifications # of minifeed stories # of profile clicks

# + other channels

for each channel, track:

% clicked % installed % uninstalled

allocations

you aren’t being punished. you’re being rewarded for a:b testing

fact - new installs jumped by 20% after allocation changes

scalability

Don’t scale until you need to.

unless you’re on Facebook.

scalingbad hardware will kill you

bad hosting will kill you

your database will always kill you

memcached will save you

scalingbad hardware will kill you

bad hosting will kill you

your database will always kill you

memcached will save you

development

ruby on rails yeah, it scales

rfacebookwe don’t use it much, it works okay

cache_fuchris wanstrath’s canonical memcached plugin for rails

magic_multi_connectionswe’re developing a replacement, but this works fine

the end.

questions?