At the recent Modern Media Strategies workshop at the Heritage Foundation, Patrick Ruffini focused his entire presentation on the eternal killer app: email (see here).

"Eyeballs" are everything for your online presence. As Ruffini put it: "Email is still the closest thing we have to mass communication on the web." He rightly notes that the famed Dean online revolution actually happened via email.

In May of this year, the Harvard Business Review published an excellent piece by Duncan Watts and Jonah Peretti entitled: "Viral Marketing for the Real World". In it they examine the elusive phenomenon where a single email thread or online piece replicates like wildfire across the Internet.

They point out that this type of "viral" event is really accidental, difficult to reproduce, and impossible to predict. Instead they advocate "big-seed marketing." Essentially, big seed marketing:

combines viral-marketing tools with old-fashioned mass media in a way that yields far more predictable results than “purely” viral approaches like word-of-mouth marketing.

They note that true viral marketing involved a "reproduction rate" of 1 or greater. That is, for every personal that receives the message he or she spreads it to more that one other person, thus leading to exponential growth. As the authors note:

By contrast, viral messages with an R of less than 1 are generally considered failures. That’s because purely viral campaigns, like disease outbreaks, typically start with a small number of seed cases and quickly burn themselves out unless their R exceeds the epidemic threshold, or tipping point, of 1.

Not everyone is into "forwarding like it's hot" (ala Michael Scott). Instead, your email send will slowly peter out to zero generation after generation.

However, the authors tell us that this "failure" can be seen as a boon if the initial seeding is large enough. For example, if you have a list of 10,000 and a email infection rate of 0.5 each generation would pass it on to half as many recipients. The math goes like this 5,000 + 2500 + 1250 + 625 + 312 + 156... After 6 generations your email infection burns out but you've reached an extra 20,000 in the process! Not a failure after all.

The authors note several examples of this type of viral marketing. An excellent read with great advice for any blogging marketeer.

On techPresident, Alan Rosenblatt asks if anything a campaign has ever produced has gone viral. I'd say this has a decent shot.

Only two videos this campaign cycle were worth me pulling my apolitical wife aside, and saying, "You've got to see this." The 1984 ad. And the Hillary Sopranos spoof.

The video breaks any number of First Laws of campaign web videos. It's "overproduced." And she's acting. It's nowhere close to authentic. But it's funny as hell. And self-deprecating.

At the end of May, the NRCC unveiled phase two of the Real Democrat Story. The site, which was first launched back in March, now includes 21 Democrat targets and new features such as web ads and a blog.

It’s our hope that The Real Blog can serve as a forum for discussing the issues that matter most to people and an opportunity to expose the broken promises and hypocrisy of Congressional Democrats. The NRCC would like to use this blog to create a two-way dialogue where folks come to participate in the process, share their thoughts and provide insights into what we at the NRCC believe is "The Real Democrat Story."

What makes this blog unique will not only be the content generated by NRCC staff and Members of Congress, but it will also feature contributors from across the country who have expressed interest in blogging on behalf of the NRCC. Already the NRCC has featured guest bloggers from Kansas, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

When we initially rolled-out the website, www.TheRealDemocratStory.com, in March, we asked people to sign-up to blog and the response was so overwhelming that we created a platform for their voices to be heard. Along with adding additional files on the Real Democrat Story, the NRCC expanded its viral marketing campaign and has sent targeted emails into each district and will run banner ads across the country. The banner ad buys, along with the emails, will reach nearly 8 million people in an effort to capture tens of thousands of additional email addresses.

The story on the expansion of the Real Democrat Story has already appeared on Drudge, and was featured on page one of the Politico.

* Josh Shultz is the New Media Director for the NRCC