Viral Marketing in Action: Update of simple case study.

On Friday evening just as work was dying down. It had been a long week. Friday morning I had been researching case studies of viral marketing and found little usable information on the subject. The fact of the matter is just from my simple attempt at launching my own case study before the weekend a great deal of information has already been gathered. Again the attempt was made very last minute and on the fly basically as I was walking out the door late Friday.

So I left for Tamworth, NH later that evening, for a planned trip down the Saco River with some friends on Saturday. I wanted to get away from my urges to re post, and RT my first message as I normally would within my other networks. I also wanted to doing nothing more than shut my laptop usually tethered cell phone off and float down the river in my rented yellow kyak all day fir this first attempt.

The good thing is I had already previously installed Google Analytic's tracking data so we could watch any update to surges in traffic that appeared whenI returned. I wasn't surprised all to see the small inrease in traffic just after the launch as seen below.

Keep in mind the viral marketing campaign itself was modest. I only wrote the blog posted the article and tweeted about it a few times on Twitter @paradoxadguy which has very small network currently. In addition I posted a link to the blog on my Facebook profile as well as my myspace profile. Also networks of around 500. All in all the viral marketing blog post blog was presented to roughly 1500 people so far and the number is still growing.

The goal of the attempt was to stimulate traffic to EverythingSeacoast.com a free classifieds site which I am currently managing marketing campaign for.

The outward goal was obviously accomplished. However the other target so far has been missed completely. Techinically the content hasn't even gone viral yet so I hope to look forward to a further increase of traffic soon.

Secondly, my goal my to make a viral marketing contest from the case study in hopes to additionally viralize the content itself as well as stimulate traffic.

So far the accomplishments overall are as follows:

Viral:

• + 17 new followers on Twitter
• +40 New visits to the site I normally wouldn't have gotten
• +5 New friends on myspace
• +2 New friends on Facebook

Target:

• +3 New Users on EverythingSeacoast.com
• +26 New Classified Ads Posted on EverythingSeacoast.com

The additional image below dosen't show this unfortunately due to the CMS currently being a bit limited at Everythingseacoast.com in terms of updated day-to -day tracking data.

I guess you'll just have to take my word on that for now. In the meantime the only information I can provide is the tracking data which shows the increase.



In the coming weeks I also plan to make several other attempts to viralize the content by submitting, post and re-submitting for additional pulls of ambient traffic, in addition to creating monitoring and tracking several new viral marketing videos which I plan to release on my own in addition to the ones we will be promoting for the contest. I will continue to post the result on this blog so be sure to bookmark it or subscribe to the feed.

I look forward to any submissions just to get an idea of what other people can think up in terms for viral content for this type of website. It should be a fun contest with some exciting results. Don't forget to read the first past and get the email address off the page where you can send you funny videos to. I would like to just see videos of people using the free classifieds services to it's full potential.

Feel free to comment any feedback is appreciated.