When I woke up this morning, I noticed a really good comment on one of our blog post. It was so good that it inspired me to write this post today. The comment was from intercultural executive coach, Anne Egros. Anne blogs over at zestnzen.wordpress.com.  She made a thoughtful comment suggesting that going viral is about connecting emotionally with an audience on our post 10 things entrepreneurs should do everyday to help word-of-mouth go viral.

Her comment got my mind churning.  My conclusion was that far too many people think that getting their content to go viral is all about them and what they want to get out of it.  However, the reality is that going viral starts with the audience, what they need, and what emotional connection one may have with them.

Remember your audience is a combination of your prospective customer and current customers.   This is a totally different type of audience than what made the Gangnam Style and Harlem Shake Youtube videos go viral.  Even though your content must be entertaining to go viral, you still must think like an entrepreneur.

When you think about going viral like an entrepreneur,  you must focus on the scientific side of going viral instead of the artistic side.  The scientific side is all about your strategy to create a viral referral loop using the mathematical formula I shared in the post that breaks down the viral coefficient.   Even though the math may seem complex at first glance, once you figure it out you will see that the process of going viral is much easier than you think.

This is why I started to call it bootstrappers viral.

Bootstrappers viral is the process of going viral that starts with focusing only on your best customers. Then piggybacking on what Anne suggest, spend your initial brain cycles figuring out the emotional reasons why those customers picked you over the competition.

With this information in hand, you can then develop a realistic marketing program to get your word-of-mouth advertising to go bootstrappers viral. This simply means that your plan must get each of you best customers to refer at least 3 people every month/quarter/year (depending on the cycle of your business), and then at least 50% of those referrals do the same.