Happy New Year
We hope you all had great holidays. After a relatively painless Rubber Republic office move, we are getting back to business in what looks set to be a busy and high-profile year for viral marketing. Here’s our report on the best viral stuff from the festive period.
News Round-up:
Death Counter
While not strictly viral related, this piece of news spread around the net like wildfire in December which is why it’s worth a mention. The World Development Movement (WDM), an organisation that campaigns against worldwide child death as the result of poverty, generated huge amounts of buzz by becoming the first group of its kind to create a presence in Second Life, the online 3 dimensional world, consisting of 1.6 million users enjoying an escapist alternative reality. What they did was build a giant billboard which disturbingly counts out the number of children who have died in the real world since Second Life began in 2003. Below the board is a widgety thing that allows you to donate to the charity. Regardless of whether or not the WDM are receiving donations this is surely a great and innovative example of Second Life being used for buzz generation.
Word of Mouth and Online Advertising
December saw the release of a really interesting report from DoubleClick the online market research company. Entitled ‘Influencing the Influencers’, the report concluded that influential people are far more likely to engage with advertising and new media platforms and create valuable word of mouth both online and offline. This is good news for us viral marketers as the whole business hinges on interactions with these influential individuals. Therefore, the essential skill that a viral marketer must develop is an ability to identify as many of these individuals as possible, to get them to engage with virals and to get them talking. Our full report on DoubleClick’s findings can be viewed here.
5 of the best
Obviously there were a lot of Christmas themed virals circulating during the festive period. Here are five of our favourites - not all are Christmasy though!
