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.

Viral Marketing In Action: A Case Study

I keep seeing people asking for case studies of viral marketing. Having not seen an available case study online myself, rather a bunch of statistical data provided by seo and viral marketing scientist's like Dan Zarella; I thought it might be good to start one and make you a part of it. Keep in mind my network isn't entirely broad in any one social media platform, but around 500+ plus for sites like Twitter, Myspace (Ghetto), Facebook etc. So over the next few weeks I will be updating this blog with additional posts relating to the responses I am getting from everyone. Also fee free to comment at any time. I would be happy to take any feedback.

The object is very simple and basic online marketing strategy. Create a viral marketing campaign interesting enough to be able to be virally self-sustaining within a few days.

Here goes...

Where I want people to participate is in by submitting viral content as part of the viral campaign. Mainly what I am looking for is for people to go to http://www.everythingseacoast.com/ . While your're there you'll notice several options right away one of which is posting free classifieds. You'll also notice links on the page to several radio stations live streams. After you register and create an account the next step is to create a video screenshot with whatever audio you selected from the main page. There is no preference of the software used but the video must be either made available on Youtube and you can submit a link to the email below or please submit it in .wmv, .mpg, .wma, or similar format, god even a .avi file if you have to. The idea is to make a video with you using the websites services to their full potential. The video only needs to last 2-3 minutes and needs to include audio from one of the staions on our website.

There will be a contest that follows for the best submitted video where the winner will win a $250 Predpaid Visa Mastercard for their effort in submitted the best video. In addition all the participants videos will be made available on EverythingSeacoast.com and updated several times daily until we reach our goal. In addition we will also be tweeting every new video posted. In turn our accounts are also picked up by several other feed burners and brand identity management resoures like Chi.mp.

We will be having a great time hopefully laughing at some of the videos produced by you creative types as the videos roll in. You can submit your viral videos to paradox@metrocast.net for the time being until we have a specific mail account set up to receive them in the future.

I will also be posting screenshots of related analytics data that we get from the attempt.

Hopfully this is fun project for everyone and we really get to see some positive responses from this. We look forward to hearing from you. Read set .... Action!!!