Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Viral Loop: From Facebook to Twitter, How Today's Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves
Written by Adam L. Penenberg
Narrated by Richard Allen
Viral Loop: From Facebook to Twitter, How Today's Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves
Written by Adam L. Penenberg
Narrated by Richard Allen
ratings:
3/5 (3 ratings)
Length:
10 hours
Description
Many of the most successful Web 2.0 companies, including MySpace, YouTube, eBay, and rising stars like Twitter and Flickr, are prime examples of what journalist Adam L. Penenberg calls a "viral loop"-to use the product means having to share it with others. After all, what's the sense of being on Facebook if none of your friends are? The end result is a business that spreads rapidly, scales quickly, and has the promise to create staggering wealth. In this game-changing, essential book, Penenberg-who identified the phenomenon in a ground-breaking cover story for Fast Company-tells the fascinating, vivid story of the entrepreneurs who first harnessed the unprecedented potential of viral loops to create the successful online businesses (some with billion-dollar valuations) that we have all grown to rely on.
While Viral Loop is fascinating for Penenberg's savvy, incisive explanation of the concept, it's even more valuable for its prescriptive nature. Throughout the book, Penenberg illustrates how any kind of business can uncork viral loops to benefit its own bottom line, even retrofitting the concept for the offline world.
Penenberg explores viral loops and their impact on contemporary American business, while illustrating how all kinds of businesses-from the smallest start-ups to nonprofit organizations to the biggest multinational corporations-can use the paradigm-busting power of viral loops to enable their business through technology.
While Viral Loop is fascinating for Penenberg's savvy, incisive explanation of the concept, it's even more valuable for its prescriptive nature. Throughout the book, Penenberg illustrates how any kind of business can uncork viral loops to benefit its own bottom line, even retrofitting the concept for the offline world.
Penenberg explores viral loops and their impact on contemporary American business, while illustrating how all kinds of businesses-from the smallest start-ups to nonprofit organizations to the biggest multinational corporations-can use the paradigm-busting power of viral loops to enable their business through technology.
About the author
Adam L. Penenberg is a journalism professor at New York University who has written for Fast Company, Forbes, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Wired, Slate, Playboy, and the Economist. A former senior editor at Forbes and a reporter for Forbes.com, Penenberg garnered national attention in 1998 for unmasking serial fabricator Stephen Glass of the New Republic. Penenberg's story was a watershed for online investigative journalism and portrayed in the film Shattered Glass (Steve Zahn plays Penenberg). Penenberg has published several books that have been optioned for film and serialized in the New York Times Magazine, Wired UK, and the Financial Times, and won a Deadline Club Award for feature reporting for his Fast Company story "Revenge of the Nerds," which looked at the future of movie-making. He has appeared on NBC's The Today Show as well as on CNN and all the major news networks, and has been quoted about media and technology in the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, Wired News, Ad Age, Marketwatch, Politico, and many others.
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What people think about Viral Loop
3.03 ratings / 2 Reviews
Reader reviews
- (1/5)How does trash like this get published? On page 12 he does not even know how to use the term negative feedback. In a book on feedback. Really, wtf.
- (3/5)The internet has transformed how we communicate and it has given virality a whole new lease of life. In the past, word of mouth generated publicity for goods. Recommend a book to a friend and chances were that they might buy it too. However, with the advent of the internet, this effect has snowballed.Virality is now an integral part of life, with events on the internet taking on a life of their own (recall how Obama's campaign used the internet and Twitter to groundbreaking effect). Penerberg has written a book which focuses on the viral effect used by sites such as hotornot.com and Facebook. In essence, what good is posting a video on YouTube if no one sees it. To grow, these sites have to get people to visit, connect and share. The author discusses the concept of the Viral Loop, or the point of referral which a website has to pass in order to become self-sustaining (i.e. have a viral coefficient greater than 1.0).While the book claims to reveal the "Power of pass it on", it really is more a history of the most successful websites in recent years. It takes us through Ning, Hotornot, Facebook, Flickr and many more, but doesn't really reveal too much other than a potted series of anecdotes. Ultimately, while interesting, it's not very revealing.