Friday Funk: Viral Marketing at Its Best
March 6th, 2009 by Allison Kulage
Today’s Friday Funk features a site that is a perfect example of viral marketing, which is a technique used to promote a brand, product, or message through a viral process. If you’ve seen a funny video, played a cool Flash game, read an interesting ebook, or even just viewed a crazy image and then shared it with your friends through email, or posting a link to it on a social network, then you have seen viral marketing in action.
So for your Friday Funk, we bring you Where The Hell Is Matt?. It’s an inspiring story of a “32-year-old deadbeat from Connecticut” who took video of himself doing his signature dance, which is a very bad one to say the least, while on a trip around Asia. It was so hilarious, that the video got passed around online until it caught the eye of the people at Stride Gum, who paid Matt to take a trip around the world, making videos of his dance. You can read more of Matt’s story here.
Another interesting twist in how we even found this site in the first place is that Larry Page of Google posted a link to it on Twitter. That’s right, I follow, um… stalk…. um… follow, Larry on Twitter. He tweeted nothing more, just a link. But the URL caught my eye and I clicked it and of course filled the office with laughter while I watched this guy do his silly dance. I’m totally going to start making videos of all the silly things I do. I may really have something here. Stride Gum… Do you hear me??? Any takers?
The moral of this story is two-fold:
1) always be yourself, and video it any chance you get. You never know who’s going to send you on an all expense paid trip around the world.
2) get creative and try to get your content to go viral. If it’s interesting, controversial, or funny enough, you could see great benefits from viral marketing. Plus, it’s just fun. And who couldn’t use a giggle now and then? Enjoy your Friday Funk.
March 14th, 2009 at 9:02 am
OK, I loved the video too. Made a tear come to my eye.
Now, as far as effectiveness…you say that this is viral marketing at it’s best…did Stride’s sales improve after this video debuted? Serious question. Because, otherwise, it’s merely a great video, not a great viral marketing campaign.
March 14th, 2009 at 10:09 am
Jonathan,
Great question. I’d like to ask Stride to share their metrics numbers with me as well, but I’m not sure how free their marketing team is with their data. We can make an educated assumption, however, that this type of viral marketing did, in fact, create some sort of brand recognition for Stride Gum. Consider the marketing budget to produce a TV commercial for Stride Gum, and then consider the number of views that commercial gets. Then, consider the budget for Stride to sponsor Matt to create this video, and then the fact that over 19 million people have viewed one of these videos on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY&feature=channel_page
19 million views and growing is a pretty nice number. I feel that this is a great example of viral marketing because it shows our clients that outside of their traditional marketing plan is the potential to gain even more brand recognition, and more visibility.