How can I learn viral marketing b

There's A LOT of bullshit out there when it comes to viral marketing. A lot of people talking theory but not practicality, and even more people regurgitating bullshit stories like the growth of Hotmail, Buzzfeed, Upworthy, and Dropbox while editing out key parts to the story. The general rule of thumb is to run like hell when you see those things and others like Blendtec, Justin Bieber, Shit My Dad Says, airBnB, and Instagram mentioned. Seriously. If you see a viral marketing book mention this, take everything they say from that point on with a grain of salt. I can safely say this after working in the viral marketing / word of mouth marketing field since 2002. More often than not, people just regurgitate the myth and not the truth. Even some of the more recent viral marketing and growth hacking books suffer from this. Anyway, if you want to learn viral marketing on your own, you can: 1. Read all of these: http://www.dropfist.com/post/69287664183/viral-marketing-school-required-reading 2. Study how the algorithms on many popular websites work and how to exploit them. 3. Learn PR, because without good PR skills barely anything you do will spread unless you have a lot of money or good connections, no matter how good the product or thing you're trying to spread is. 4. DON'T read Seth Godin's shitty book, "Unleashing The Idea Virus" that everyone recommends. Or Malcolm Gladwell's anything. Seriously. Fuck that guy. 5. Practice. Try to get things to spread on a basic, local level that you can monitor and tweak things. As you increase your success of doing this, you'll start to figure out what you need to do in order to get that idea or product to spread further and further. 6. Understand that most viral marketing / growth hacking success stories are all smoke and mirrors. More often than not, someone knew someone, a company got involved and gave them a boost, they paid a celebrity to tweet them or promote them and then signed them to a non-disclosure, they cheated Craigslist, they wrote a script to auto-follow everyone on Tumblr, they used venture capital funding to get 100,000 Facebook fans and then launched their site, the list goes on and on and on. That's not to say true viral success stories don't exist, but don't believe everything you hear, and be wary of anyone trying to sell you viral marketing / growth hacking advice. Particularly the latter. *** Like the answer? Tip your writer. Get your copy of http://amzn.to/1lDclSF today.

Sometimes, it can seem that it's just pure luck whether or not something goes viral! This is something I've been desperate to find out - is there a secret to making content go viral? There is actually a lot of research on virality. Jonah Berger wrote a highly coveted book on the matter, called ‘Contagious’, where he details six principles of viral content. Check out this post I've just written which delves deep into viral content; http://www.blueclawsearch.co.uk/blog/2014/02/19/why-do-people-share-the-science-psychology-behind-viral-content/

2 books I found good:  - Contagious by Jonah Berger  - Viral Loop by Adam Penenberg Growth hacker book always refers to those. Andrew Chen's blog is a must read: http://andrewchen.co.