New Examples of Viral Marketing
The Link Baiting and Viral Marketing session at Search Engine Strategies (SES) Conference in San Jose, August 9, 2006, featured Chris Boggs, Avenue A | Razorfish; Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz.org; Jennifer Laycock, Search Engine Guide; and Cameron Olthuis, Advantage Consulting Services. They discussed various ways to get a large number of incoming links to a website using viral marketing techniques. Jennifer Laycock and Chris Boggs came up with 30 examples between them that marketers can study and learn from.
The Link Baiting and Viral Marketing session at Search Engine Strategies (SES) Conference in San Jose, August 9, 2006, featured Chris Boggs, Avenue A | Razorfish; Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz.org; Jennifer Laycock, Search Engine Guide; and Cameron Olthuis, Advantage Consulting Services. They discussed various ways to get a large number of incoming links to a website using viral marketing techniques. Jennifer Laycock and Chris Boggs came up with 30 examples between them that marketers can study and learn from.
The idea of this session is getting links by creating something that creates buzz, that is worth talking about. Blogging especially can be a driver. Examples from Jennifer Laycock, both good and bad, discussed included:
- HotMail -- zero to 12 million in 18 months
- Subservient Chicken, Burger King
- South African Wine Stormhoek -- free give-away, "the unofficial geek wine of Silicon Valley"
- Google Analytics got lots of buzz, but couldn't scale fast enough and had to turn away users.
- Gmail invitations make the inviters feel cool, thus make them inclined to invite more friends.
- Blair Witch Project
- Netscape Now buttons are now passe, but once were on nearly every early website.
- A case study from panelist Jennifer Laycock focused on TheLactivist.com Project to promote breast feeding and milk-bank donations. In six months they earned $2,500 profit plus $1,000 more for milk banks, plus major news mentions, 1,000 incoming links, and 36,500 visitors.
Chris Boggs of Avenue A | Razorfish added other examples of effective viral marketing campaigns.
- Digg
- del.icio.us
- Slashdot.org
- Zillow.com
- Optimus Keyboard, Art.Lebedev Studio
- Riya Visual Search with the ability of users to add comments
- Microsoft xBox: Halo 2
- Procter & Gamble, Tide Challenge
- Firefox (Funnyfox)
- John Dvorak's "Inflammatory posts"
- Movie "An Inconvenient Truth" developed "Terrifying Message from Al Gore" at YouTube
- Television show "Lost" created an organization called "Hanso"
- EepyBird.com ("Entertainment for the Curious Mind") combined a concoction of Diet Coke and Mentos mints for an explosive mix, plus videos of the results.
- Milliondollarhomepage
- SaveToby.com (send money or we'll kill the bunny rabbit)
- MarketLeap's tell-a-friend link
- We We Monitor
- Akamai's Net Usage Meter
- Veganza's "Flying Spaghetti Monsters" and the "Pastafarian" movement
- "Air force One graffiti story" (over 180 links from Google News)
- Justilien's Viral Link Baiting Study
- P&G Folgers Viral Videos
Of course, these are the cream of the crop. Effective viral marketing ideas are notoriously hard to conceive of and implement. But when you strike gold like some of these, the traffic and links can truly mushroom -- or expand exponentially like a virus in heat.
