1. Planned
2. Spontaneous

Naturally, you can’t plan every thing you do to go viral. It’s nice if you set a plan in motion and it works. But it need not work in order for your message to go viral. The crowd can make it go viral for you.

In order to tap into the spontaneous viral marketing pool you’ve got to have a message, but not just any message. It’s got to be a great message. It’s got to be a message that people will want to share with their friends. If it’s great enough, people will share it without any prompting. And that’s the kind of viral marketing that works best.

Of course, you can always plan a viral marketing campaign. And if you can do that and pull it off, great. But note that just as many attempts to plan a viral marketing fail as succeed.

If you focus on building great content – I mean, really great content – then the viral marketing will take care of itself. All you have to do is give it a nudge and it will go.