FLIRTing with the Crowds

My friend Riku Vassinen already christened yearbookyourself.com to be the most effective viral of 2008. For this verdict, I would need to see how much clickstream/business the site is generating to the actual advertisers’ sites (multiple brands represented there and it seems the site is paid for by a group of malls), but it certainly seems a success by terms of its spreading efficiency and visits to the viral site itself. Approximately within two weeks around half of the facebook friends I connect with on regular terms had visited the sit, and many had changed their profile pic to the one they created on the site. If you don’t believe me, just check out the conversation thread we had there this week:

So yes, it’s amazing what can be achieved with a message and phenomenon that taps the right mood in the crowd (as Duncan Watts argues, it’s not about the right people, it’s the right atmosphere among the people), but still it needs to be kept in mind that for a viral to be truly effective, it needs to be generating impressions and traffic - and ultimately money - for the advertiser. Traffic to the funny viral site is not enough, although the rise has been rocket-like:

I have to say that linking today’s fashion trends with those of the past was a nice idea to tie the fashion business to the action on-screen (which involves skipping through different decades and checking out which style looked good/funny on you), but I at least didn’t pay too much attention to the advertising brands’ links, let alone clicking on them. The site however generated a purchasing behavior in me: I have never had the need for glasses but those ones I have in the picture just looked so good/funny that I simply had to google for 50’s glasses and quickly found a web shop selling them. A week later now, I just wore them for the first time and got pretty good response from my friends too. This could be called ‘accidental marketing’, a theme I’ve been thinking about lately as a result of also another occurrence within the past couple of weeks: after seeing this video, I instantly jumped to iTunes and bought the latest album of the band performing the song that the (obviously a genius) guy is drumming to. I doubt this was an intentional marketing ploy by Dragonforce, but an effective one nevertheless. Have you had any accidental marketing happening to you lately?

And yeah, the insane video I mentioned: