Viral marketing has gone viral. It’s one of the things agencies are most excited about selling right now (social networking is another) and, as a result, we’re getting request after request for web development on “viral” projects. We’re also getting a lot of requests for advice on pulling off a successful viral campaign like our Make My Logo Bigger Cream video!

There are no guarantees of success when launching a viral campaign. If you understand the target audience well, you have a solid concept that will resonate with the audience, and you’re feeling optimistic that your campaign is going to spread like the flu, you’ll want to make sure your campaign’s success doesn’t get hampered by a technical issue.

Scaling

It’s nearly impossible to predict how viral a campaign will be. The results may be underwhelming, overwhelming, or somewhere in between so your job is to ensure that no matter how viral your idea is, your campaign is ready to handle the traffic.

The last thing you want to have happen is to have your website go down when you’re getting hundreds of thousands of responses to your campaign. Your technology should scale to meet whatever traffic your website receives. For starters, consider using services like Amazon’s S3 and EC2. These services are designed to provide computing power, bandwidth, and file storage in a scalable way. If your site gets 1,000 visitors or 1,000,000 visitors these services scale to handle the demand. Be selective when choosing a programmer to implement your viral ideas. If they can’t answer your questions regarding scalability you should shop around.

In addition to making sure your website scales to meet demand, be sure other components of your campaign can scale as well, such as product inventories or promotional items associated with the campaign.

Forward-ability

Successful viral campaigns require that each user has two things:

1. A desire to forward the campaign to others
2. The ability to forward the campaign to others

You’re probably confident that your idea will inspire others to forward the campaign to others; they’ll want to get the word out. But don’t underestimate the importance of making sure that it’s extremely easy to forward the campaign on to others. Users may want to tell others but if there are too many steps required or if it takes too much time, they may not follow through.

Here are a couple of key points to consider when trying to ensure maximum forward-ability:

1. Offer the user a way to tell others such as an online email address entry form which saves the user from switching to his or her email client.
2. Censor rather than approve user input. For sites that rely on user uploads of videos, photos, or other user-supplied content, queuing uploads for review means users have to wait until their files are approved before they can really send them on to their friends. This has the potential to kill the viral capability of the site. Instead, automatically show uploaded content but have a censor monitoring uploads and removing inappropriate content.

Tracking

Web analytics are a key component of any successful viral campaign. If you don’t setup analytics you’ll have no way of knowing how your campaign is performing. In addition to telling you how successful your campaign is, analytics can also help you see ways you can optimize your campaign for further success.

Especially during the first few days of your campaign, monitor your analytics account fanatically and look for trends that may suggest you can tweak your website to get even more traffic. The analytics can also help you identify top traffic sources which can give you clues as to who is providing the most viral effect for you.

The appeal of viral campaigns is hard to resist because cost per influence decreases significantly over time. If you have the right idea and are confident it can become viral, just make sure you’ve planned for the best-case scenario and your campaign is scalable, easy to forward, and has tracking in place.

What are your suggestions for launching a successful viral campaign? Post a comment below.