Using Viral marketing to find Red Balloons
December 7th, 2009 by Tim WintleA team from MIT has won DARPA’s “networking challenge” using an age-old viral strategy.
The DARPA networking challenge – launched in aid of the 40th birthday of the internet – consisted of searching for ten red baloons placed around the USA and a single team reporting all ten of them at once to win $40K.
The challenge was designed to see how social networking could be harnessed to help “solve problems” (given the military connection it seems reasonable to assume that they’re also interested in seeing how to integrate intelligence into social graphs)
The MIT team that won performed a classic viral marketing strategy. In a multi-level marketing campaign (similar to a pyramid scheme but without guaranteed income), they gave the person who discovered each balloon half of the value ($2K) – the person who signed them up half of the remainder ($1K) – the person who signed them up half of that ($500) … etc. The remaining money was given to charity.
By building their social graph only through recording referrers, they managed to create a fully connected social graph (which I’ve previously shown to be the most desirable form of social graph to “go viral”).
Further, the fact they were incentivising their participants managed to encourage the rapid growth of such a graph – (presumably built piece-wise from the social subgraphs of other networks) – pushing them firmly towards going viral.
