On Friday, PaidContent ran a story indicating marketers' intent to grow spending on Viral Marketing over the next 6 months.  We, at Oddcast, can attest that this is already a reality.  Since the beginning of the year we have seen a steady increase in large brands signing up for viral applications.

This attention on viral is a good opportunity to remind ourselves of some tried and tested truths about viral applications and what makes them successful.

Viral efforts work best as part of a larger, integrated media campaign.  A good viral application / campaign will amplify traffic and brand message.  However, a completely unsupported, stand-alone, viral effort that does not leverage other brand assets, sites, brand equity and seeding opportunities, will be challenging to produce results.

This ties into Big Seed Marketing, the concept that viral applications act as amplifiers of campaigns, but require the media support of a larger, often cross-medium, campaign in order to consistently and predictably, drive results.

We see this reality work time and again, where successful viral campaigns were tied to a larger narrative.

Volkswagen BabyMaker, tied to a large print and TV campaign and seeded by it.

Careerbuilder's Monk-E-Mail, tied to the TV commercials building brand equity in the monkeys for several years.  The campaign was also seeded, and still is, from Careerbuilder's well trafficked home page.

TrekYourself, tied to Star Trek movie release and the official site for the movie.

And Elf Yourself - tied to the largest campaign of them all - Christmas!

There is a great paper by Duncan J. Watts, Jonah Peretti, and Michael Frumin about Big Seed Marketing. Its worth the read and captures the reality of Viral Marketing in the real world.