If the strategy is wildly successful, mailservers must be added very quickly or the rapid growth will bog down and die. If the virus multiplies only to kill the host before spreading, nothing is accomplished. You must build in scalability to your viral model. Exploits common motivations and behaviors Clever viral marketing plans take advantage of common human motivations. The desire to be cool.
Greed drives people.
So does the hunger to be popular, loved, and understood. The resulting urge to communicate produces millions of websites and billions of e-mail messages. Design a marketing strategy that builds on common motivations and behaviors for its transmission, and you have a winner. Most people are social. Nerdy, basement-dwelling computer science grad students are the exception.