The Four Viral App Objectives (a.k.a., “Social network application virality 101″)

A lot of folks have asked for more details on the way we measured and optimized viral app growth in the Stanford class I co-taught recently. So here’s a bit more info on methodology for measuring virality and what it means for an app to “go viral.”

K-factor and R-zero

Terms like “K-factor” (contagion) and “R-zero” (reproduction rate) are often used to describe the growth rate of viral apps. These terms come from the fields of medicine and biology — they’re originally intended to describe the spread of of viral diseases, but they’re nice analogies for how web/SN apps grow. Some would even describe widgets and apps as “diseases” that have “corrupted” popular social networks like MySpace and Facebook! Of course, having worked at Slide and authored some FB apps of my own, that’s clearly not my belief… So, read on if you’re interested in viral apps!

Avinash Kaushik’s Five Levels of “Web Analytics 2.0″

I had the pleasure of hearing Avinash Kaushik, Google’s analytics evangelist, speak when he came to our CS377W class at Stanford this quarter (the “Stanford Facebook class“).  He’s an amazing speaker, really breathing life and purpose into the too-often dry topic of web analytics.

He’s promoting a new way of looking at web analytics, what he calls “Web Analytics 2.0″.  Avinash’es central message is that analytics cannot stand alone as a decision driver in organizations; rather analytics need to be considered in the context of additional data (from customers, competitors, and other internal sources) in order to drive rational decisions.

Avinash has a brilliant decision framework, consisting of the five decision inputs that should be considered in order to gain insight into customer behavior and drive optimal decisions.   He calls this “The Five Pillars” and here’s the cliff’s notes summary:

Five Levels of Web-based Product Design

Anyone who has been involved with launching a website knows that there are lots of design factors to consider. Even a marginally sophisticated website will require development and coordination of multiple web page layouts, graphics (visual assets), text (marcomm or copy), server code, maybe some browser-side code (javascript), database tables, etc.

It can be a lot of stuff to consider and anyone responsible for launch of a product (e.g., product manager, product marketing manager, or a business unit lead) needs to think about “product design” from multiple levels.

Personally, as a product manager, I like to think about “product design” as the sum of five design perspectives: