I was doing my early morning scan of Twitter when I came across a tweet with a shoutout to send “LinkLove” to anyone you want (ie friend, colleague or favorite blog).  After a short music video starring Hubspot’s resident triple threat Rebecca Corliss (singer, dancer and inbound marketer), I checked out the lovefest.  All you have to do to share the love is enter your Twitter name, your friend’s Twitter name and “their URL”.  Like all good viral campaigns, the made it “stupid easy” to share and it wasn’t long before my Twitter stream was full of their #linklove hashtags.

So why all the buzz about #linklove?  For those of use trying to build a business organically (OK, using inbound marketing as Hubspot would say), inbound links are gold.  When they come from a site with stronger page rank, this is even better.  I feel pretty confident that Hubspot has more Google page rank than 90+% of the people on Twitter (Hubspot = 6 vs. Tangyslice = 3) so the once the “linklove” pump is primed, this was highly likely to go viral.  Everyone wants a free link from a site with more page rank.

Or so they would think…  OK, I’m not an SEO expert (but I play one on television).  A closer look, however, reveals that linklove.hubspot.com has no pagerank (yet).  Thanks to all those inbound links i would expect this to improve pretty quickly.  Would it have been better to put it on www. hubspot.com/linklove instead?  Any SEO experts out there to offer an more qualified opinion?

A more cynical marketer might also suggest that Hubspot is getting the better deal as the value of the aggregate inbound #linklove links to likely exceeds the sum of the link building value to all of us “lovers”.  It doesn’t take an MIT degree to figure that it just doesn’t matter.  Unlike many forms of marketing, there’s no cost to giving somebody a link so in the end this viral campaign is fun and everyone loves a free link.

I once again take my hat off to these guys (Rebecca, Mike Volpe, Rick Burnes, et al).  Half the battle is coming up the idea for the killer viral marketing campaign and the other is making it happen.  They did both really well…  Congrats.

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Time to get sneezing.

Early yesterday morning I received an email from the campaign reminding me that it wasn’t over yet and there was still time to send that viral video to friends.  They were encouraging me to send to ten friends and they would send it to ten friends…You get the idea.

We all know that identifying a target market is imperative to any marketer.  That is frequently followed by the slow, painful process of compiling a list of likely targets or a “prospect universe”.  Whether you build it yourself or buy it from a third party, it is often difficult to capture more than 75% of a population.  Each new data source shows diminishing returns so you need to think creatively about how to source new names.  Inbound and outbound marketing helps but the acquisition costs can be prohibitive.

This viral Obama video was impressive.  I didn’t hesitate to forward it on and unwittingly gave them my name for a future appeal (OK, I should have read the privacy policy more carefully).  Getting people to share their name and interests in exchange for information or entertainment is a proven acquisition technique and we just witnessed a group that mastered this art.

Can you suggest any other creative examples of ways to economically build a prospect database?

I started this post with the goal of creating another one of those “<insert prime number here> ways to make your marketing more viral” rants.  I’ll get to that in a minute but before I do let’s demystify all that is viral.

• Viral spread is more challenging if your offering isn’t inherently sharable.
• Virality isn’t a silver bullet if your other marketing programs aren’t working.
• Some pretty smart people have recently challenged the view that all it takes is a couple of “big sneezers” to to create an online “epidemic”.
• Viral is not a business model (apologies to the 50+ social bookmarking sites who will soon be sucking on fumes).
• BurgerKing’s subservient chicken really isn’t a chicken.

So what is viral?  Well, in many ways it is very similar to some old school things like customer referral and customer advocacy programs. You know, give your best and/or most vocal customers easy ways to “tell a friend” and maybe they get a little something back for their troubles.  Like many web 2.0 ideas, you just take an tried and true concept like customer referrals and soak it in a sharable application-based infusion to get $25M+ of VC pixie dust (See Widgetbox).

Unfortunately, many of us live in World 1.0 and have CEOs and boards that measure performance based archaic things like revenue and profits.  So for the rest of us, here are some simple ways you can make your online marketing more sharable (you can still use the word viral if you want to impress your boss or poker buddies).  In the long run it can be cheaper to get your happy customers to do your marketing for you.  This doesn’t mean you can cut all your old school “push” marketing programs, but viral programs can make a big difference.

So here is my list of five things you can do to make your marketing more viral:

1. Get your users to consciously share your brand – This means adding “email a friend” and other sharable links on every page.

2. Get your users to unconsciously share your brand – Think Hotmail.  They built a huge business by adding a simple footer to every email sent through their site.

3. Give your users widgets or sharable applications – I know I made fun of Widgetbox earlier but they do provide users with an easy way to share your content through a range of channels.

4. Give your users an incentive to share – Even my auto repair shop has a customer referral program.  I can get a $40 Dunkin Donuts gift card if I send a friend to them.  Chances are your customers will respond to the proper incentives too.

5. Entertaining videos/games/quizzes/screensavers – This is what most people think of when they hear the words “viral marketing”.  The best ones don’t always have the highest production values.  It just has to resonate with your audience enough to get them to pass it on.

There are other more subtle approaches one could employ to leverage network effects to enhance adoption but that is for another day.