Viral Marketing - Some Learnings

Since ever, we've felt that the best way to scale MeraSport's user base is by word-of-mouth and other viral marketing methods. Yesternight, I stayed up till 2 in the morning/night to add this fantastic free tool from Social Twist to fire MeraSport's online viral effect. The results (check the implementation here) in one day have been no less than encouraging - though, there's a long distance to cover. 

While you try to get rid of this bug from the screen, here's a list of some learnings about viral marketing. Obviously, as time progresses, I plan to keep updating this post with newer learnings:

1. If you want your subject to tell N other friends about you, give him/her an altruistic reason to do so. Of course, that altruistic reason has to be true too. We felt that continuation of MeraSport's free alert service was a reasonable incentive for our subject to promote the concept. It's true, too.
2. The best time to request (you have to request) the subject to spread the word is when he/she is at the peak of his satisfaction while in your territory. We felt that on MeraSport, this is when he/she gets the confirmation about the subscription for the free service. I think we'll soon identify a much better occasion, though.
3. If you have the right product, and you are absolutely sure that it has viral capabilities, the users will find you. They will find you like it was their only mission of existence. Once this is done, wou will have just no control over the word-spread - so make sure your supplies are plentiful, and distribution network on red-alert.

2 + 2 = 5, for sufficiently large values of 2.