Viral effects are advertising with low/no staying power because people lose interest and move on to another bright shiny new thing. Network effects have staying power because people in a network tend to all have similar interests.
Short Scenario: Living with an Girlfriend, a normal situation, _you_ are completing her spoken sentences before she could finish (not a 'what was that word'-situation) -because you can and may do what everyday-internet-practice does since...^^
This is a long and market-y way to basically explain two ideas.
Here's the simple idea:
Viruses infect new users. Users go up.
Going viral would be things like FOMO or hijacking a popular twitter account with a sign-up bonus link.
A network effect is sometimes used to describe interaction between users. Users go up because users stay or users don't leave. There's a stark difference in an app that everybody uses versus an app that nobody uses, that's basically it.
Math wise: A virus forms a graph that is a tree. Nodes infect nodes infect nodes. Nodes have to be uninfected to be infected. Lots of real life examples.
A network effect is a network of nodes that interact with each other. This is often just like the example they give, where nodes can form multiple connections to each other. If each edge connecting a vertex represented a function adding value to each user, and a viral effect can only sustain an edge to a vertex it previously was not connected to, then yeah by definition one has more connections than the others.
All this article is trying to say, a viral effect can only add value from one user to another.
A network effect can add value from one user to many users and likewise, many users can add value to one user.
I think something viral is something transient and isn’t “repeatable”. Network effects allow things to be repeatable and is leverageable. Viral effects aren’t so leverageable. Viral effects do rely on network effect though.
I don’t think you can choose. From the way I see it, virality is an emergent phenomenon. You cannot “make” it viral. Virality happens—except with artificial virality via ‘bots.
So to get back to the question I don’t think one can choose natural (uncoördinated) virality. A celebrity takes advantage of their graph on a network but it does not ensure virality at all. Virality is a property assigned by the ephemeral viewership as that item strikes a harmony with the mood of the network members —which isn’t predictable. Obviously if something natural catches on, you’ll have copycats trying to replicate the effect to ride the wave of the original. For that to work you have to weave your message to fit into the phenomenon without seeming too artificial.
With normal probability theory, one can calculate that for neutral-fitness (R=1) potential viral things, the chances that a particular one will spread are small — but those few that do spread significantly hit (in order to maintain that average R=1) an arbitrarily large proportion of the population.
They _are_ network effects, but a function of the social network and not your product. Going viral can be a strategy for getting customers but you still need ongoing value to remain a going concern.
Note this is fully explained by ~0% of pitches are funded (online or not) and the .0001% that are funded are sought out and reached through insider networks (not inbound applications of any kind, online or not)
