Here’s an interesting new buzz-phrase to become familiar with: bigseed marketing. Viral marketing is something almost every company has tried their hands at lately, most with varying degrees of success. But if they’re willing to kick-off the campaign with a “big enough seed”, their chance of failure goes down.

Standard viral marketing is based on an analogy with the spread of infectious diseases. If you start with a seed of individuals who spread the message by “infecting” their friends, the expected number of new infectious people generated by each one is called the “reproduction rate,” or R. If R is larger than 1 then you have a successful viral marketing campaign, if it is smaller than 1 then your campaign will fizzle out.

The point that the authors are making is that unlike infectious diseases marketers have a few more controls than diseases. First they can start with a much bigger seed. And with some of the new social networking/sharing tools that enable people to more easily forward messages to friends, they can also improve their message reproduction rate. And both those factors add up. Say that you have a reproduction rate of 0.5 in your campaign and that you send it to 10,000 people, then those people would pass it on to 5,000 and those would pass it on to 2,500 and so on – eventually reaching 20,000 people, twice your original seed. By having the ability to tweak both the size of the seed and the reproduction rate, you can optimize your campaigns – even when they are not totally “viral.”

If you increase either of the variables, your totals will jump through the roof. Everyone tries to capture the fire of viral marketing, but most fail. Is it because the seed they used just wan’t big enough to get the ball rolling?