Virality: Developing a Rigorous and Useful Definition of an Information Diffusion Process

Abstract

This paper notes that while marketing has defined and written deeply about “viral marketing”, the process of virality has not been defined. And while Marketing scholarship is interested in creating, managing, modeling and predicting viral word-of-mouth (WOM), other fields may be more interested in studying naturally occurring viral diffusion events. I explore some of the questions that fields like Communications, Political Science and Information Science might be interested in asking about viral information events, and then, after discussing definitions of viral found in various bodies of literature, I argue for a definition of virality as a WOM diffusion process wherein a message is actively forwarded from person to person, within and between multiple weakly linked personal networks, and is marked by a period of exponential growth in the number of people who are exposed to the message. I further suggest that one result of a viral event is the creation of a temporally bound, self-organized, interest network where membership is based on an interest in the information content or an interest in being included in the interest network of others. In the discussion section I present areas of potential research related to viral processes and interest networks.