I met Joseph Carrabis at SESNY05 in at NY Hilton last year - before he started writing for Imedia Connection.   I got a call from Joseph Carrabis last Friday - he had been trying to reach me to elobrate, or correct, a statement he made in an article that I quoted of his last month.

I’m posting Joseph Carrabis update about the Viral Propergation Factor in Viral Marketing Campaigns.

"Hello, Mr. Sponder,

Thanks for talking yesterday. Nice to make your acquaintance (again).

I’m on vacation this coming week and wanted to respond to you before leaving. I’m also ccing this email to Dr. Cindy LaChapelle. Please feel free to contact her (and she may contact you) should you have any questions about what we do, etc.,

Regarding my response to your blog;
 (from your blog)

2. How fast will the campaign spread (propagation factor)?

I disagree with Joseph - how can you know this for sure beforehand?  When observing this through web analytics you could notice how quickly traffic to tagged urls increases based on who the person (seed is) and over a period of time might be able to predict how quickly viral campaigns can spread - but not the first couple of times.

(my response)
I should have written the question more clearly as "How fast do you want the campaign to spread?"

There are several models for how fast information can spread in a well described system. Some of NextStage’s R&D staff have backgrounds in social anthropology, econo-physics and immunology, the first two dealing with social networks and networking behaviors and the latter with virology and the like. We used tools from these and other disciplines as foundations for our research, then adjusted the models according to the behaviors we were witnessing.

There have been several studies about the spread of information through social networks, many of them available on the web and some even in popular culture (6 degrees of separation, for example).

The other thing to be aware of is that predicting the future is (to me) still a juggling of probabilities and possibilities. At times these two spheres merge and the point of intersection is "a possible thing that will probably happen". Part of the process is insuring the spheres of possibility and probability are small (well defined). The better the definitions of those spheres, the more accurate the prediction. Those are the ones to go for.

I hope this is helpful. Thanks for the opportunity to comment

 I think Joseph is saying that you can make a Viral Marketing Campaign spread as fast as you want and there are several models that predict this.