A little over a week ago, I caught up with Seth Godin to talk about the great success of Squidoo. As you might expect, the conversation included a lot of discussion about what makes the web great, and strategies and tactics for making something go viral.
Much of Seth’s focus with Squidoo was just that - to make it go viral. At the heart of making something viral is providing a participant with a reason for telling others. We are not talking about compensation here. We are talking about things like pride of authorship, getting their name widely recognized, etc.
Squidoo is successful because each Lens is designed to be an expert’s view for a given topic area of the web. People create lenses about topics they are passionate about, and then they want other people to see it. Some of these people are passionate about a topic too, so they create another lens, and so forth.
Layer on top of that they can automatically route their revenue share (yes there is a 50-50 revenue share) to the charity of their choice, and now you get some interesting dynamics. The charity organizations get in the game, and start promoting Squidoo to their members.
It’s a great story. Check it out.
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