MarketingSherpa rules. If you don’t have a subscription to their free newsletter, you should get one (I am NOT an affiliate. I just love the publication).

MarketingSherpa examined more than 100 Viral Marketing Campaigns and came up with the top 12. The subtitle to their report is Top 12 Campaigns You Should Swipe Ideas From. I totally agree.

Here are their notes from examining the campaigns:

1. You don’t have to spend a lot of money. One of their most popular campaigns had a budget of less than $1000. This is encouraging.

2. You should define success with the action rather than the traffic. In other words, getting users to the site is important, but the ultimate goal is to get them to do something. It’s that something that should be the measure of success.

3. Seeding blogs is in. Getting mentioned in blogs is becoming a measurement of success. This made me chuckle. We’re in!

4. Optimized press releases are also a great tool. Sending out an $80 press release about your viral microsite really, really works … as long as you plant optimized keywords in your headline, opening paragraph and hotlink wording. [Right from the text]

5. Forced email forwarding is out. MarketingSherpa calls forcing someone to forward your offer to someone else to get a reward or prize skanky in today’s privacy-sensitive permission-based Internet world.

A true viral campaign gets forwarded because consumers are compelled to do so by the glory of the content, not because you bribed them with points. Terrific.

Their number one campaign was Peerflix Paparazzi, a Flash game where you are a photographer that has to take certain celebrity pictures. For example, you get $2000 for each picture of Jackson Michaels without his mask on. His animals try to get in the way. It’s clever and fun. You can see it here. Results? Within 90 days after launch nearly two million> unique visitors played the game more than two times each - plus 5% traveled onwards to visit the main brand’s site. And that’s the entire point after all. The campaign details are here.

There are some terrific examples here. You should take a look.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 12th, 2006 at 3:04 am.
Filed under Viral Marketing, Internet Marketing.
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