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Viral Loop

From Facebook to Twitter, How Today's Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
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.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      December 21, 2009
      Allen's powerful voice and thoughtful vocals are the perfect medium to relay Penenberg's pronouncements about how such Web 2.0 businesses as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Flickr are reconfiguring marketing models and the road to wealth—and how the mechanisms driving the growth of user-driven technologies are nothing new (remember Tupperware parties?). It's a snappy, topical read made even more memorable by Allen's performance: his vocal range is wide, but he wisely scales back his intensity to command our attention with his sheer charisma. A Hyperion hardcover (Reviews, Oct. 26).

    • Publisher's Weekly

      September 29, 2009
      In this clear-eyed collection of case studies, Fast Company contributing writer and NYU journalism professor Penenberg examines the engine driving the growth of web 2.0 businesses like Flickr, YouTube and eBay to Facebook and Twitter: the viral loop. The concept behind a viral loop is simple-in order to use the product, you have to spread it, thus creating massive, user-driven growth cycles-after all, Penenberg explains, social networks like Facebook are worthless to a user if one's friends aren't also using the products. Viral loops are nothing new, of course, and Penenberg has certainly done his homework, tracing the concept back through its analog roots via entertaining and enlightening anecdotes about companies like Tupperware, which used "parties" to turn ordinary housewives into an army of sales reps, to Charles Ponzi-yes, he of the Ponzi scheme, a viral scam recently taken to historic levels by Bernie Madoff. Penenberg truly succeeds, however, in showing how the viral loop has found its groove on the Internet, fueling a wave of billion-dollar companies all built on word of mouth-and, of course, user clicks. Solidly researched and briskly-written, Penenberg at once captures a great business and tech story, as well as a defining moment in our online culture.

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  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

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  • English

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