Examples of viral marketing

Viral marketing requires alot of creativity. You can always copy good ideas that have been used in other industries and apply them to your business. As long as it is something new to your audience it doesn´t matter if the idea isn´t unique.

In this article I will give a few examples and tips that may inspire you to create your own campaign.

You may know that Google uses time as one of the factors in its ranking. Extra authority is given to older websites with older links to it. But on specific topics, new content with alot of new links gets extra value! If many new pages are created on a topic and many new links are created to those pages, Google sees the topic as newsworthy. To rank high on a newsworthy topic you need to have alot of new links to your page.

A good example of newsworthy topics are large sports events like last world cup soccer. The whole world wrote daily about it mentioning the searchterm “world cup” and other related terms. At that point to rank on “world cup” you needed new links and probably up-to-date content to get those links.

Stop the wold cup
The thing we did was start a fake group of women that where against the world cup. Women would be neglected during the world cup and they wanted to make their point by protesting in the news and on their special website. The website got alot of attention and people visited the website because they couldn´t believe anyone was crazy enough to be against soccer. Unexpectedly there where also many people that agreed that the world cup was getting too much attention and made the world go crazy for a month, so we had people with different opinions discussing on the website and this made the website even more popular. If you read yesterdays article on viral marketing you can see this campaign follows every point to start a good buzz. The site ranked high on “world cup” in different countries and languages and that is worth alot of money.

Yet more tips
A good viral campaign doesn´t have to reach the whole world. Viral marketing that reaches only your target audience is just as good. The more specific the industry you target, the better it is for your ranking on the long run. The best virals don´t only end up in the news, but hopefully they stick and end up on more permanent pages. If your message draws emotion, is newsworthy and specific to an industry it is more likely to have a longer lifespan.

Beacause yesterdays post was cut short by my son getting out of bed, I will post some more tips in this one. This will probably not be my last post on the subject, so I´ll keep some tips for later.

• Be against something everybody is probably for. And for something most people are against.
• Include someone famous in your industry in the message. Mocking a respected opinion helps, but be carefull of backfiring. This also helps the spreading of the story within the industry and not too much beyond.
• Re-use good stories that didn’t get enough attention just because they wheren’t launched with enough marketing power or stories that where used in a totally different industry or country.
• If the viral marketing is a joint venture of multiple experts in the field it spreads even better. Have a small incrowd that´s in on the real intentions of the story and have them benefit as well.
• Plan multiple actions to enhance the lifespan of the message and deploy them right after the buzz has reached its peak. Think ahead of possible outcomes of your story and don´t be too surprised if it doesn´t go exactly as you planned.
• If you don´t want people to know you´re behind the buzz, don´t make it easy for them to find out. Impersonating someone else is the riskiest part of viral marketing. The most common mistake is registering the domain on your own name. If you post in forums to aid your campaign, don´t do it with your own domain or from your normal IP.
• Don´t try to steer the story to much when it has started. Once it starts leading its own life it becomes very succesfull. Just make sure no one takes of with it and benefits more from the publicity then you.

These where todays tips. Just the tip of the day left:
If your viral action is worth it I´m willing to offer free advice. Contact me when you have a great idea!

Tuesday, September 12th, 2006 at 10:25 pm | Tutorials, Links
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