> It’s a difficult one as ultimately the success of any viral
> campaign rest with the quality of the concept and
> execution....

You said it - technically speaking number of "seeds" in a viral campaign is not important because true viral compaign will have more people "infected" on every cycle, than in the cycle before, in geometrical progression.

For example, if every "infected" person "infects" 2 non-infected more, then even if you start with 1 person as your "seed" then you will end up "infecting" whole planet after just above 20 cycles. Naturally, the key sign of a true viral campaign is what I'd call "virulence factor", which in my example is 2. It is that factor that determines actual viral coverage and in fact it determines if a campaign is viral at all - strictly speaking if factor is less than 1 then campaign is in decline and will stop spreading after X cycles.

Ok, enough theory, here are some hard stats: we did some "viral" research in Jungle.com but we failed to achieve truly virulent factor being greater than 1, for us it was 0.1, which still meant we gained extra 10% of coverage that we would not otherwise have. I'd say very few campaigns are actually viral even though those who create it would (probably) disagree and (most likely) insist that "email a friend" is a viral feature.

Hi, new to all this.

What sites/companies come recommended as those good to seed a viral?

Hi Lucy,

Ultimately it is down to quality and execution of the viral. However, seeding is proven to help.  I've been working in seeding for four years (so I probably would say that!) but every campaign needs seeding to get started - generally speaking this involves contacting most influential bloggers.

Even if you have a very strong viral and place it on youtube, it will not necessarily get 500k views (what is generally considered as a successful viral).  What is required, is as many opportunities to 'discover' the content on the web - this means adding it on reddit, all of the other video sharing sites and letting bloggers know about it.

The key part of blogger relations is identifying people who will find the viral interesting - is it a mobile phone or ice cream. Does it include dancing? For every element of a viral there is a community online who will find it relevant.

For stats, I think that 40 blogs posts is generally the target amount for a decent viral. Although, the more that people embed it, the better.

If you come across a viral on youtube, you can access the stats for it, and you'll see from this that thousands of views can come from one post on a high traffic blog.  For me, it's all about these blogger relations.

There's a few case studies on my website at http://www.viralseeding.com if you want to see a bit more.

Cheers,

Lee