Viral Marketing on the Web

A caveat for viral marketing advertisers

2005-04-17T11:10:00.000-07:00

Let me set the stage: You are walking along, minding your own business, when suddenly you get a SMS text message reading: "Outbreak: I'm infecting you with t-virus, my code is ******. Forward this to 60022 to get your own code and chance to win prizes. More at t-virus.co.uk." With the recent hysteria over mobile phone viruses spreading over bluetooth, you could be forgiven for panicking. In fact, it's nothing but an ill-conceived viral marketing ploy from Capcom, the maker of the videogame "Resident Evil" to promote the release of a new version. Web-surfers could navigate to a page on the company website and send *anyone* an SMS text message similar to the one above, *without* the phone owner's knowledge or permission. It seems clear that while viral marketing campaigns have enormous potential and allow advertisers to leverage comparitively tiny budgets into potential pop fads, some responsibility is called for. Anti-virus company Sophos has this to say about the T-Virus spoof and similar viral hoaxes:
"Many virus hoaxes:
--falsely claim to describe an extremely dangerous virus
--use pseudo-technical language to make impressive-sounding (but impossible) claims
--falsely claim that the report was issued or confirmed by a well-known company
--ask you to forward it to all your friends and colleagues
--As usual, you are urged not to pass on warnings of this kind, as the continued re-forwarding of these hoaxes simply wastes time and email bandwidth."
As viral marketing for commercial purposes becomes more popular, it seems that there is an ever-finer line between an innocuous self-spreading advertisement and spam. Technically speaking, since the company (in this case Capcom) only enables third parties to send the SMS message to phone users and does not send them directly, it doesn't meet the traditional definition of spam. However, it seems to me that companies should use some 'best practices' to avoid foisting messages on unsuspecting people via email or phone that leave them bewildered about where the message came from and even whether it might be dangerous or not. It would seem wise for viral marketing campaigns in which anybody can pass on content to anyone else with the click of a button to take measures to lessen the confusion/alarm of the recipient. The following are just a few suggestions:

Use so-called "captchas" (images of text that can only be read by real humans and must be re-typed before a form can be submitted) to prevent automated 'bots' from abusing the system and ensure that a real person is doing the sending

Require (or at least strongly recommend) for senders to enter a valid email address and their real name, or at least a nickname that the recipient would recognize, before they can pass on the viral ad, and include that information with the message

Inform senders that their IP address and associated information will be recorded and that any abuse of the ad campaign could result in civil or criminal liability

With some generally accepted Best Practices, viral marketing campaigns on the Web can continue their phenomenal success without generating a backlash from angry consumers.

Watching the pot boil

2005-01-19T09:57:00.000-08:00

One of the biggest frustrations of putting what you hope is a great, viral piece of content out on the Web is the uncertainty. What actually happens to it? Unless it gets real media attention, you may never really know. Traditional "counters", visible or invisible, will not get you very far, and the resolution of the data is spotty. So what is the solution if you want to release content free of charge for anyone to pass on and at the same time keep your hand on the pulse of the campaign as it spreads?
My personal suggestion is to use so-called 'tracking URLs'. These collect data each time a hyperlink is clicked through, no matter where it might be embedded. You can get a free trial of the service I personally use from AdMinder. I had to really do some digging to decide on using them, but the feeling of fine-tuned control you get is well worth it, even if you're not a compulsive stat-checker like I am.
The one thing I had concerns about with tracking URLs was the usual necessity of using long, hard to remember hyperlinks containing all sorts of symbols (#, &, ?, etc.); they look ugly, they're impossible to remember and they're easily mistyped. So to get around that issue, I automatically set up a forwarding link that is much simpler-notice that if you click the link to AdMinder you will see "http://adminder.webscriptorium.com" in the address bar. That way I can see how many readers found the link useful. Handy, huh?
I perform that last little trick by using a nifty little service called Namestick, which effortlessly allows me to create easy-to-type tracking URLs. Check it out! You can also use it to register a domain name and have it point to free webspace you might have from, say, your ISP, that has a long and clunky-looking URL. So in instead of


"http://yourISP.com/freespace/?yourname.html"

, you can have "www.yourdomain.com"-all without having to purchase hosting...I hope this information saves somebody the trouble I went through trying to solve these problems.

Amazon's new order virus

2005-01-14T21:34:00.000-08:00

After making a purchase at Amazon.com, I noticed that there was a form box on the order confirmation page where you could enter the email addresses of your friends/family and invite them to save 10% on the same thing you just bought. If they go to the site and buy your recommended item, not only do they get a discount, you get an Amazon store credit for the dollar value of their 10% discount.
Amazon doesn't tout this as a viral marketing ploy, but that's just what it is, and you don't have to be Amazon.com to benefit from that kind of an offer. Any online store could do the same. I don't know if any firm data exists on how many of the average online business's customers join the affiliate program-I would think it's rather small. I know a lot of people who give me a blank look when I mention affiliate programs. But this little twist makes it a point of purchase whim-why NOT send a quick email off to your friends saying what you bought and giving them a store discount? That's what separates a really good viral idea apart from your garden-variety email chain letter: if the sender feels like they get a benefit out of sending it on and the recipient is glad you sent it, how can you lose?

MasterCard launches a virus (not the bad kind...)

2005-01-13T07:47:00.000-08:00

This weblog is generally more focused on viral/buzz marketing for individuals and small businesses, but it doesn't hurt to follow what the big boys are doing, does it? In that spirit, take a glance at the latest corporate viral marketing campaign by ad agency DMC for MasterCard. Both the agency and the campaign are U.K.-based (MasterCard is sponsoring the "Brit Awards"), but like everything else on the Internet it's really global.

When you click through to the site, you get a lineup of 25 quirky pop culture icons, each one with a text box underneath. The object of the game is to type in correct guesses for all 25 pictures (you get as many guesses as you like). If you make it, you are entered in a drawing for free tickets to the Brit Awards. Now, for me this really would not be very useful since I'm across the Atlantic Ocean from the Brit Awards, but still...

Here's the viral part: you have an option at the bottom email the game to a friend along with your score, and you even have an incentive to do just that-even if you don't win the game, you get a shot at the free tickets for every friend who DOES win.

The game can be found here.

When the next craze HAS TO happen...

2005-01-09T09:47:00.000-08:00

Usually, content that generates viral buzz has something accidental about it. Whoever creates it has control over the quality of the material, but then they just set it free and see what happens. For someone who is really banking on something spreading far and wide, this approach takes a leap of faith, faith in the way people's minds work on the Web, kind of like listing something on eBay for 1 cent with no reserve. I think that last approach is the most likely to be successful, however, because it meshes with the way people and peer-to-peer networks operate. They don't like pressure, they want to be the arbiters-and they deserve to be.
In contrast, let's look at what happens when a corporation can't just relax and let the buzz be. Just as an example, take the coming release of the 'new, improved' "Trollz", which DIC Entertainment is promising will be the next big toy fad. DIC plans a media "carpet bombing" including not only a Trollz.com website with interactive games but books, cartoon collections on DVD, a cartoon series and a whole slew of advertising. The downside, I think, is that when corporate fad-makers try to create pop sensations out of whole cloth, they capture the attention of the public but not necessarily their imagination. So the buzz exists, but it isn't bottom-up, it's top-down with an iron fist, and they run the risk that as soon as the media and advertising blitz begins to subside, their product will die with it. I think that while most people see the incredible power of going viral, many, especially at the corporate level do not grasp that the best buzz is not manufactured, it's self-propagating. And that's not to say that there is no way to have a hand in it, just that you can't force it. If you force it, with, say a hugely expensive top-down advertising push, you will get results, but to borrow a movie industry expresstion the trend won't have "legs." Like an overpromoted B-movie, it will have a great opening weekend and then fizzle. Trust the buzz, even if it means some nail-biting.

Feast on viral traffic...

2005-01-08T13:44:00.000-08:00

I got an email the other day from Jeff Mulligan, the creator of Searchfeast that brought attention to its use as a viral marketing tool. Basically, this program allows webmasters to post a searchbox on their site (for free) that allows their visitors to search the popular Clickbank eBook and software marketplace. The webmaster then gets a commission, at no cost to the searcher of course, for any products they buy. The viral power of this searchbox is as follows:

Let's say I have a favorite product on clickbank, either authored by me or something I have bought that I a sure others would also enjoy. I choose to have this product as one of a handful of recommended links under the Searchfeast searchbox. When someone else comes upon my searchbox and decides they would like one of their own for their site, they click through and easily set one up. The viral element comes when that webmaster in turn posts their own searchbox on the Web: my chosen featured product link will appear right under theirs...and so on. In short, your link propagates itself virally.
This is one of my favorites among what I call 'website objects', since they can be plugged in anywhere through copy-and-paste. One of these clickbank searchboxes can even be used as an exit-popup for people who leave a site without making a purchase. I personally use mine all the time: I am always browsing for new clickbank products, but the clickbank site frustratingly does not have a search function. Searchfeast solves the problem. A viral cure for what ails you-check it out here.

P2P and P&G

2005-01-08T11:56:00.000-08:00

Online social networking sites are all the rage these days. Some, like Friendster and MySpace, allow posters to literally go viral by using an 'invite a friend' feature. When they accept, the friend's 'network' now includes your profile and all of the profiles of the people linked to yours and the profiles in turn linked to the profiles belonging to friends of friends, etc. Sites like Friendster and MySpace have intrigued advertisers, but aside from selling banner ad space these social networking portals were largely launched with the go-go 90's premise of 'build first, monetize later.'
So how does this relate to viral marketing? When a peer-to-peer (P2P)-type network exists, sooner or later advertisers will figure out how to introduce advertising that mimics the way the network functions and blend it in. This is exactly what Proctor & Gamble has begun to do on the MySpace network to promote its new Secret Sparkle brand. So without infringing on trade secrets, here's the formula they're using:

Post a profile in the name of a popular celebrity who endorses their product

Write a blurb or two about the celebrity (in P&G's case it's Hillary Duff)

Blend in information and graphics promoting the company's product

Soon enough, many online social butterflies will opt to become 'friends' with the celebrity (at least on the site), and when their profile gets passed on or requested by their friends, the celebrity pitchperson hitches a ride.

Firefox gets viral

2005-01-06T06:18:00.000-08:00

You will notice that I posted a button saying, "get firefox." For those not yet converted, Firefox is a relatively new, completely opensource Web browser that is competing head to head with Microsoft's Internet Explorer. In all seriousness, I really do admire Mozilla's opensource software programs, and I use them. But I posted it mainly to draw attention to one of the best examples going of an organic, grassroots viral buzz campaign. The Spread Firefox website was built completely by fans of Firefox and Mozilla, which is itself a nonprofit without deep pockets. Visitors are encouraged not only to download and use the browser, but to submit their own artwork, marketing ideas, ad buttons, blog entries, and more. Fans even organized independent of Mozilla to pay thousands for a full-page ad in the New York Times.

Memes and adbusters

2005-01-06T05:35:00.000-08:00

What's in a meme? Would Starbucks by any other name smell as sweet? Memes get in, get out and get passed on before we consciously know what is happening. So what is a meme? I'll let the dictionary answer that one: “an element of culture that may be considered to be passed on by nongenetic means, especially imitation.” Sounds complicated, but it's not. Indeed, memes survive by being basic, almost primal paens to our instincts. How does an urban legend go viral? How does a brand? Why do people pass on chain letters and forward joke emails without reading them to see if they are really all that funny? The most contageous memes cut straight to the emotional quik: desires like money, sex, food, danger. Something can propagate far and wide without necessarily having merit or 'quality', but just because it has the right meme. Memes scream to be imitated: buy now! run! get your dream home today! pass this on right now! Memes could certainly be used for worthy purposes, but they clearly could be, and are, used to play tricks with people's minds. So in a way memes cut to the roots of much of the hostility directed at corporate advertisers. Is this what McLuhan meant when he said that in the future packaging would be passe and things would be sold out of barrels? Because the only real way to innoculate against memes that circumvent our better judgment is to take something out of the package, look it over under good light and really see it and evaluate it on the merits before we buy it or pass it on to a friend. Memes got started because they served a purpose, like little 'macro' scripts for the brain that speed up reaction when there's a clear danger or reward that needs to be dealt with, not pondered over. But eventually they degenerate into marketing fodder. Get out there, stop to think, and build some good memes.

When companies learn to let the buzz be...

2005-01-05T19:07:00.000-08:00

Call it what you like-talk value, buzz, viral marketing, word of mouth…It all boils down to the idea of wild, genuine popularity, popularity moreover that is not artificial and forced but organic and merit-based. The topic of this post is the relationship, sometimes symbiotic and sometimes strained, between viral content and the corporations that benefit from it.

Time and again, a lone citizen comes up with something, often a short film, that catches the zeitgeist wave perfectly. Where it gets hairy is when these pop phenomena contain brand names, like iPod or Budweiser. What happens when a third party comes along and without really meaning to stumbles onto the set of some vast corporate marketing drama? Will it be “cease and desist” or an open-arms embrace? It depends on the company, of course, but I think many corporations are realizing that real buzz is hard to create in a laboratory, so when it comes along they do best to leave it be.
Take for example the recent famed video clip about the Apple iPod by George Masters, with its inspired .mp3 soundrack playing “Tiny Machine” in the background? Nobody at Apple had anything to do with its creation, but contrary to expectation they have not attempted to shut out the wildly popular clip. Yet it was created not because the author had any financial interest in the iPod, but rather as a promotional sample of his work that tapped into something he, and others, already identified with. Using a brand can be a kind of direct synaptic shortcut to connecting a designer with the public, rather like how novelists make readers identify with a character by having them drink a Coke or a Bud Lite.
Bud Lite, it so happens, was the beneficiary of an eerily similar viral buzz fest way back in 1999-2000, when an aspiring film director, Charles Stone III, made a short film about a group of friends who call each other, each one saying “Whassup?” The answer is of course, “I’m just sitting here drinking a Bud.”
Both accidental viral ad campaigns meant a bump to the company’s bottom line-Bud actually used the “Whassup?” short as a SuperBowl commercial. It's advertising agency, DDB, estimated Bud got $20 million in free advertising.
But what happens when companies try to create viral crazes from whole cloth? Is ‘buzz’ quite as sweet when it is created by Madison Avenue? Some companies have gotten away with it, mimicking grassroots pop film shorts and spoofs with ad campaigns like Burger King’s “The Angus Diet” and “Subservient Chicken” (see previous posts), or the “Superman” films with Jerry Seinfeld by American Express. But I think by and large the public is suspicious when corporate America tries to ‘narc the buzz’ and try to come at consumers through the back door, pretending to be just one of the guys.
I am betting that the smartest corporations will react to ground-up viral content from outsiders (as long as it is not offensive) by both sparing the hapless creator the traditional corporate iron fist approach and keeping their hands off the creative.

Mavericks of the webosphere

2005-01-05T06:55:00.000-08:00

Creating a viral presence, on the Web or offline, often means relaxing standards of 'ownership'. Buzz can sometimes be most easily generated by creating something of real, pragmatic worth and then releasing it with very little in terms of rules and regulations on how it may be used, altered or described. Alex Frankel brings up an instructive example in his recent book, Word Craft. The word 'maverick' derives from a 19th century Texan, Samuel Maverick, who sold a parcel of land and received 1,200 head of cattle as payment; for whatever reason, lost to history, he did not brand them but let them roam free all over the region. Depending on the storyteller, Samuel Maverick was either the largest cattle owner in Texas (since he could theoretically claim any unmarked cattle as his own by default) or the most incompetent businessman to ever enter the livestock trade. This is an extreme example, but whatever Samuel Maverick might have lost in cash, he certainly made up for in 'buzz'. There were many Texas cattlemen richer, but none other so far as I know whose names are now in the dictionary. Take this slightly fuzzy concept and apply it to a modern opensource idea like Linux, the freerange OS. Linus Torvalds may not be outlandishly rich for giving Linux away for free, but the Linux code has grown organically through a kind of viral buzz into a real threat to Microsoft Windows. But what about marketing? I always like to use extreme examples like Samuel Maverick and his free beef and then see what can be taken away from that into the 'real world'. In terms of 'viral marketing', the compromise is to RELAX the legal ties that keep products and ideas fettered and insular but find some way to retain a way to make a profit. Giving away free tools like the PC-based alarm clock I pointed out in a previous post is one good solution-all that is needed is an unobtrusive, no-pressure banner ad/text link that gets passed along with it. I think that as the marketplace becomes more and more saturated, the best marketers will increasingly be the ones who figure out how to give things away for free and make their money indirectly by 'planting a seed' and sewing it widely. "Viral marketing" could just as easily be called "seed marketing": just as many plants propagate by enticing insects or birds to either carry their pollen or eat their seeds and drop them somewhere else, products or ideas can spread like wildfire if they get picked up and passed around rather than sitting in locked glass cases.
For anyone interested in marketing in general, language or both, I strongly recommend Alex Frankel's Word Craft-check out Frankel's web page.

Be the first to know...

2005-01-04T10:22:00.000-08:00

If you are interested in hearing about the latest and most interesting viral ad campaigns floating around the Internet, take a look at the Viralmonitor newsletter, a U.K.-based resource that I find very useful.
Viral marketing may be a buzzword relic of the 1990's boom, but the CONCEPT is anything but dead, and I believe there is still a lot to be learned and new territory to be explored.

Cheap but effective affiliate program solution

2005-01-03T20:43:00.000-08:00

One of the truly best ways to generate free viral advertising on the Web is clearly to have other people pay to advertise for you. And absent being some sort of svengali, the only way to make that happen is to have an affiliate program. However, for most startups there are obstacles in the way:

Managing your own affiliate program reliably requires very expensive, often custom software.

Third-party solution providers who will reliably manage an affiliate program for you are either very expensive, like Commission Junction/BFast or very limited in the types of products that can be accepted, like Clickbank (downloads only).
So I was pleasantly surprised when I recently happened on an impressive company called clixGalore
that seems to do a very good job of serving startup companies and individuals who would like to offer a professionally managed affiliate program but cannot yet afford all the bells and whistles of an enterprise-class solution. Don't get me wrong-there are quite a few larger companies that market through ClixGalore, but there are certainly more small enterprises represented than I have seen elsewhere, and it is actually FREE for merchants to create an account. I signed up immediately. There are premium options, but the basic account is free, and you can always upgrade later if it is working well for you.

The best things in life are free

2005-01-03T11:54:00.000-08:00

I slept through my alarm clock this morning, and of course the first thing I did, being a Web junkie, was search the Internet for some sort of online alarm clock that might work better. I found one, and not only would it work straight from my PC desktop and use any sound or music file on my hard-drive that I chose to wake me up, it was also viral! A simple, classic viral object, one simple and extremely useful script that had a clickable banner above it and a link to email the site to a friend. I don't know about you, but personally I am very likely to use it and to pass it on to a few friends and relatives I think might like it as much as I do. So in the spirit of passing on those really useful kernels of free content, here's the link.

Viral like a mad cow...

2005-01-02T16:06:00.000-08:00

I had mentioned before that I am a big fan of the work of the ad fim Crispin Porter +Bogusky (no, I am not affiliated with them in any way whatsoever). So here is a link to another of their successful (and very funny) viral ad campaigns, The Angus Diet, which takes the form of a spoof on fad diet cults like SouthBeach. Viral marketers have to be good entertainers as well as good marketers. At least, it's a lot more fun for everybody that way.

The RSS feed pandemic

2005-01-02T09:14:00.000-08:00

The latest and hottest catchphrase in viral marketing and buzz-generation is RSS, aka 'webfeeds' (personally I prefer the latter, since it bypasses the unasnwerable debate over what the acronym RSS actually truely stands for). Yahoo! has been making a splash with its buttons that automatically add a site's RSS stream to a user's My Yahoo! page without their having to know a thing about how RSS actually works. In the past, all that you were likely to find was a trendy-looking orange button with "XML" or "RSS" in all-caps, and when you clicked on it you got the site's unique URL for its RSS feed, which was fine and good if you had an RSS aggregator/reader and knew how to use it. But if you did not, it could be a bit hair-raising.
To be truly VIRAL, of course, you want your RSS webfeed to be one-click accessible to site viewers, not give them a technology anxiety attack. So to me, "Add to My Yahoo!" RSS button makes a lot of sense, and it is brilliant viral marketing launch on the part of Yahoo!. That said, most sites still have (and should have) a traditional orange badge that lets users see the naked URL and lets them manually add it to the aggregator of their choice. To start signing up for RSS feeds to appear on a My Yahoo! page of your own creation, just go to My Yahoo! and sign up for a free account if you do not have one already. I recommend it if nothing else simply to keep tabs on what Yahoo! is doing with this service. For publishers, Yahoo! has created a page that will automatically generate a cut-and-paste html code using your own RSS URL that you can add to your site and offer your own visitors the option of adding your webfeed to their My Yahoo! page with one click (click here if interested).
To search specifically for RSS feeds that follow your interests, you can use Feedster. It is not pay-per-inclusion and I have found it to be reliable and useful, since the major engines still do not have RSS as one of their existing file-specific search options like images or PDF (though this is sure to change soon). Feedster also has a buzz index that allows you to type in a keyword and see the popularity of searches for RSS webfeeds related to it.

Viral PDF files

2005-01-01T20:10:00.000-08:00

Viral PDF solves the problem of how to make free PDF downloads able to be easily customized. If you didn't think of this as a problem, read on.
If you have information that you would like to distribute, there is always the avenue of posting in relavent newsgroup bulletin boards. But any bulletin board has limited distribution, and most newsgroups have strict rules on posting that prohibit the use of sig files or html hyperlinks in the body text. Email is always a possibility, but whenever you go the email route you run the risk of false-positive Spam accusations. In my opinion, the best option for something longer than a few paragraphs is often a downloadable file, and my hands-down first choice would be a PDF file. This is simply because PDF files, unlike .EXE files,

cannot by definition carry viruses, spyware or adware and

offer much finer control over formatting, so that the file will maintain the same 'look and feel' regardless of what operating system or web browser the viewer is using, and whether onscreen or printed.

But this control over how the document displays on the author's end does not translate into ease of modification on the reader's end.
Why would you want readers to be able to modify your PDF file? Because it's so much more fun that way and greases the wheels of truly viral buzz. Essentially, the bare bones of the PDF remain the same, but if you do it right the file can have its links, including affiliate links and email links customized. This might seem a sacrifice, but it is a smart sacrifice. Allow a user to add their own flourish to your free content and they will be motivated to pass it on for free to others in their network or offer it as a free bonus with their own paid content.
Unfortunately, the ability for readers to customize is not built into the Adobe Acrobat platform. But it is available as an affordable plugin-type application that can be downloaded here.
Click here for more information on the .PDF format from Adobe. The actual Adobe Acrobat software is expensive, but keep in mind that there are quite a number of free PDF-creation tools available on the Web that will allow you to make a decent .pdf file.

Indie bands and guerilla marketing

2005-01-01T18:32:00.000-08:00

It is truly amazing to see the sheer number of websites, books and articles that laser in on viral marketing, guerilla marketing, 'buzz', word-of-mouth, or any of half a dozen other terms that basically mean the same thing: having people "pass it on." This article discusses how viral marketing can be used by indie bands.
Perhaps medieval monks were the first viral distributors of information. Monasteries freely exchanged hand-written codices that were dutifully copied and then returned; the copies were in turn themselves copied, and so on. The result was the preservation of many essential classics of philosophy and science that might have been lost, and every time someone forewards a joke email or a jazzy new streaming commercial for Burger King, they are following in the same tradition, albeit with a generous pinch of banality.

PR Web (get your 15k of fame)

2005-01-01T16:38:00.000-08:00

In the future (or maybe it's now the present), everyone will (or does) have their own 15k of fame. That's not a typo-I think fame can be more accurately measured today in bandwidth than time. If you have something to say or something to sell, or both, you had better get it out there; make sure your message is put in front of the right people at the right time. And to make up for that platitude, I'm now going to actually say something specific. PR Web offers anyone the opportunity to issue FREE press releases, the kind that actually end up in front of journalists, freelance writers and plain all-around RSS-feed newshounds. You are encouraged to make voluntary contributions to help support the ongoing services of the site, but there are no actual fees. Of course, like anything else online there is the potential for abuse. PR Web and other press-release outlets have been used in the past by, for example, self-interested short sellers looking to trash the reputation of a company with a false press release and profit from a momentary stock price plummet. And of course there would always be spammers lined up around the block to issue a 'press release' for V1@gr@. So when you submit your press release(s), make sure that they are written with actual relavent content and not as blatent advertorials, or your release may get squashed by PR Web's minders.

Viral marketing articles on the About network

2005-01-01T16:26:00.000-08:00

There is a good list of articles on all things viral here , courtesy of About.com

If it's sticky, pass it on

2005-01-01T15:40:00.000-08:00

People love to email things to everyone in their address book. Virtually all online content providers now have links at the end of articles saying 'email this article to a friend'. Marketers also take advantage of this; if someone comes across a webpage with a funny videos, cartoons, games, etc., they just might pass it on to their friends. If there happens to be advertising mixed in here and there, it will get passed on, too, and in theory a small (or large) army of webusers could soon be hawking your merchandize for free. I know that I emailed a few people a link to the Subservient Chicken page (see previous post). But what is the average SEM'er to do when it comes to would-be viral content? I am personally a big fan of the free resources at FreeSticky.com , which has a categorized directory of free content that can be used anywhere, royalty-free. This is very useful, since I find that doing a search engine query for 'free content', 'free videos' or something similar only results in a quagmire of spam-sites. A one-stop shop for this kind of material is a real time-saver. This is not to say that it is the only place to go, but it is certainly a very good start, and you could get by without looking any further. For those interested, you can also add your own content that you are willing to syndicate for free to the FreeSticky directory and spread it around. They say Publish or Perish; why not have other people publish for you?

viral mail (the good kind)

2004-12-31T22:28:00.000-08:00

An example of viral marketing in action: free web-based email programs. Think Gmail, Yahoo! mail, Hotmail, etc. I personally have a Yahoo! mail account, and every time I send a message Yahoo's own 'signature' message is appended to the end inviting the recipient to get their own free Yahoo! mail account. Going viral often means giving something worthwhile away for free, something that people want, whether it be a video or audio clip, an eBook, a free affiliate program...It takes a leap of faith, of course, not to rely on the common-sense approach of charging for everything, but some of the world'd most successful companies have shown time and again that it can pay to give away. Of course, most of us do not have the resources to offer people unlimited free email accounts in order to promote our goods or services, but there are certainly cheaper, even free, ways to generate viral buzz without an enterprise-class budget. Tomorrow I will be discussing how 'viral marketing' relates to traditional offline 'buzz', so be sure to check in if you are a word maven. There will be enough catchphrases to please Faith Popcorn! Again, please join in by posting your own ideas and thoughts.

Avian Flu

2004-12-31T08:56:00.000-08:00

I know this site has been posted endlessly around the Net by now, but I just had to draw attention to the Subservient Chicken as a perfect example of viral marketing in use by a large, brick-and-mortar corporation like Burger King: Subservient Chicken
Also visit the advertising agency responsible for the viral Subservient Chicken ad and some other brilliant content, Crispin Porter +Bogusky of Miami, Florida. An exciting section of their site highlights "Projects up for Grabs"-if you feel that you fit the bill for one of their ongoing or upcoming assignments, you can email them directly and attach a sample of your work!

Clickbank as a viral marketing tool

2004-12-31T08:20:00.000-08:00

I have recently been exploring Clickbank, and it strikes me as a very basic but powerful method of viral marketing on the web. Try a search for 'free advertising' on Google. What a mess, right? With the vast majority of schemes out there, I cannot help but scream "where's the catch?", because there clearly is one. But I find it easy to trust the concept of affiliate marketing as a free viral advertising solution simply because it is based on other people making money for themselves. It is easy to see the motives of affiliates, and that transparency somehow comforting.
Example: PPC advertising on Google AdWords costs a minumum of 5 cents per click, and a minimum of 10 cents per click on Overture. But you need only perform a few random searches and count the number of (aff) notations on the PPC ads to see how many people besides the actual owner of a product are out there every day spending their own money to promote someone else's company-because it makes them money according to a set percentage they can bank on.
Back to Clickbank...In the beginning, it was behemoth online retailers like Amazon.com that started to offer affiliate/associate programs, and now a sizable percentage of blue-chip, Fortune 500 companies do the same. But to take advantage of this powerful viral tool, sites like Amazon.com or eBay use enormously expensive, complex enterprise software solutions that are custom built for them from the ground up. So where does that leave the startup company, let alone the lone Web marketer with just a laptop and a dream? That's where Clickbank comes in. Clickbank allows anyone to list their product (downloadable only, like software or infoproducts) with their marketplace, and Clickbank's countless thousands of existing affiliate marketers are instantly able to promote it using a link containing their own Clickbank nickname, for a percentage cut that the owner of the product desides upon. No software solution to purchase, no commission tracking headaches requiring an army of pencil pushers.
Listing a product with Clickbank costs $49+ each (you can only set affiliates' promotion links to go to one page per product). But I am testing a software solution that may provide an alternative to the clunky 'one account per product' hobble. Stay tuned...In the meantime, try the CBMall search engine to explore the Clickbank marketplace (Clickbank itself does not have a built-in search cabability, nor can its products be searched by searching within the URL clickbank.com on Google, as Clickbank does not host product content on its own servers).