Viral marketing science is all about figuring out what and how content spreads online through scientific analysis. It draws from fields including sociology, neurology, statistics, history, psychology, economics, biology and memetics.
Using scientific methods, it is possible for mere mortals to create repeatably viral campaigns.
"IVMS will make college education, work experience, and personal development a thing of the past. E-fame is the new currency."
-Brian Wallace (Nowsourcing)
The Institute for Viral Marketing Science seeks to further knowledge of and understanding in the science behind viral marketing, a term that is thrown around with increasing frequency without any real thought to what makes it work. It is the science of viral marketing that allows us to accurately predict the how and why of something "going viral." Without science, we are simply guessing at what makes users tick and tossing ideas out in the hopes that something will stick. This institute aims to provide certification courses in viral marketing science so that great marketing minds can finally understand what their target audiences are really thinking and what will make them behave in a way that is beneficial to the brand or product they seek to promote. In short, IVMS teaches marketing professionals what "real" viral marketing entails.
IVMS was founded by Dan Zarrella, a self-taught viral marketing scientist who has spent years researching various scientific avenues and their application to viral marketing. His work with Twitter, the swiftly growing micro-blogging site that has taken the social media scene by storm, studies the exponential growth of content spread through this channel. Tools like TweetSuite and TweetBacks help users monitor their content and track its growth, with the final frontier on the horizon being the ability to predict how content will spread and what we as marketers can do to improve that content's virality. Zarrella has studied similar patterns with his research into link attraction factors, or what compels people to link to content as opposed to simply reading or dismissing.
The central theme of Zarrella's work, and the founding principle of this institute, is the idea that by studying people's actions, we can infer their motivations and produce content tailored to their desires. In doing so, we can anticipate what they will do with this tailor-made content and seed or package it in a way that causes them to carry out our intended action and spread the original content in a manner that meets our needs. Put simply, content will almost certainly "go viral" in a predictable way that we can track, measure and control. At least to some extent.
A certification in viral marketing science will provide you with the means to take on more challenging and complex projects with a much higher success ratio. The IVMS courses build on each other, forming a strong foundation across the scientific disciplines while retaining a strong connection to the underlying marketing sense behind this knowledge. Through the bridging of two seemingly separate studies, IVMS has created a superior level of viral marketing that is built upon thoroughly research data and meticulously studied statistics.
