Random mumblings of an SSE Scott Howard's Weblog

You may not have heard the term viral marketing, but you've almost certainly experienced it, and most likely even played a part in it's spread.

Virtal Marketing is what we used to call word of mouth, grown up for the Internet.  It's where a marketing company relys on others to spread their message using the Internet - blogs, web forums, usenet, websites, etc. In order to do this, they need to come up with something with a high coolness factor - something that people will want to share with others.

Many Australians will be aware of the Carlton Draft "Big Ad", which was released on the net 2 weeks before it was first played on TV. In that 2 week window it was downloaded from the internet over a million times - before it even appeared once on TV!  How did they do this? Google for "carlton draught" "big ad" and you'll see how - almost 37,000 pages containing these terms, most of them blogs or other user-created websites.

About 3 weeks ago I discovered first-hand exactly how viral marketing works.  It all started innocently enough - a webpage containing a photo I had taken of Sydney Harbour. It wasn't exactly your average photo - but more about that in a later blog entry.

I put the photo on a webpage, and told almost exactly nobody. I emailed the URL to a few friends, and pasted it to 2 IRC channels with collectively about 20 active people on them.  A few days later I checked my weblogs and noticed that I was getting some hits from http://forums.overclockers.com.au/ - someone from one of the IRC channels has posted the URL into the forum. A few hundred hits over a few days - I thought nothing more of it.

A few days later I checked the logs again, and found that I was now setting hits from a few dozen different blogs and forums. These ones hadn't come directly from me, but were 2nd, 3rd, 4th generation of people forwarding on the link, and were resulting in around a thousand visitors per day.

Over the next 2 weeks things escalated a little. First it was digg.com, then the New York Times website, and literally thousands of others (well over 3000 different refering URLs at last count). The few hundred visitors has grown to over 400,000 visits, and over 3/4Tb of traffic.

Let me say that again - I gave the URL to around 30 people, maybe half of whom bothered to look at it. Through word of mouth those 15-odd people passed it onto, directly and indirectly, almost half a million people!  All with a marketing budget of exactly $0.

Try doing that without the Internet!