A close friend of mine Ryan Petersen recently became the managing director at a start-up based out of Scottsdale, Arizona called ImportGenius, a Web application that allows you to search international trade records to find out where your competitors are buying their products overseas,

Ryan and I go way back and even spent time working together in the online PR industry for a few years doing some pretty exciting things with blogs during the formative years of the blogosphere. Naturally I wasn’t surprised when he recently orchestrated one of the more impressive PR campaigns I have seen in a while via social media.

Using ImportGenius to analyze Apple’s shipping records he saw that they had been importing unusually large quantities of “electronic computers,” a classification that he pointed out had never been declared before on their shipping papers. Ryan put together an article encapsulating his theory that Apple was importing the next generation of iPhone and posted it onto the ImportGenius blog as well as a few social bookmark sites he participated in.

It wasn’t long until several of the tech blogs picked-up on the story including TechCrunch. From there, the story blew up, making its way to the online versions of the Washington Post, the Daily Telegraph, Forbes, the New York Times and scores of other mainstream online publications.

What fascinated me about the situation was the way the story became viral through social media channels.

I’m sure stories like this send shivers down the spine of those of us in the newswire industry because they bring to life the potential in social media to viralize (I just made up that word) news through channels that are 100% free.

I was reminded of the Social Media Release panel discussion that took place at the NewComm Forum last year (Mike Keliher offers a good recap.) in which one member of the audience laid-into the newswire representatives over their pricing - pointing out that he managed to create buzz by posting a news release to Facebook.

At the time remember thinking his argument was a little bit silly but it actually serves to help frame the dynamic that I am about to propose, that Viral plus Vocal Equals Visible.

What this matrix hopefully describes is how the virality (a news stories’ intrinsic likelihood to go viral) of a story and the vocality (how vocally the story is described) of a story are related. I realize that this takes into account a lot of assumptions (like the assumption that some stories are more likely to become viral than others) but I’m going to leave these aside for now (after all this is a blog and not an academic paper).

So Ryan’s blog article would be in quadrant A because the story has a high virality (it is a kick-ass story) but low vocality (he posted it on a blog that not many people read). Now, he juiced the vocality of the story a bit by adding it to several social bookmark sites and that provided all the fodder necessary for the story to go viral.

If his story had been lame and uninteresting it would have fallen into quadrant C (low virality and low vocality). On the other hand, you can take a story that is terribly written and boring and put it through every newswire in existence and it still won’t catch fire.

Or think about it another way: lets say you are trying to start a fire. If the material is highly combustible (high potential to go viral) you don’t need much of a spark. If, on the other hand, the material is not as combustible then you’re going to need more of a spark.

Now, the question is what composes the virality and vocality of a news story?

That is a question for another day. . .