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Category: E-commerce

Saw The Viral, Bought The T-shirt

cyborgname.gif
There is a class of viral campaign that uses personalized badges or buttons on people’s sites to drive traffic (do we have names for different classes of virals yet?). One such campaign is “The Cyborg Name Generator”:http://www.cyborgname.com/ created by the endlessly fascinating “Lore Sjöberg”:http://slumbering.lungfish.com/.
The name generator site is incredibly simple. You enter a name, pick a cyborg body, and the site spits back a funny “Cyborg Name” for you.
Of course the first thing a new class of blog-happy youth want to do is share their cyborg name with friends, so Lore provides them with the code to add the image and a link back to the generator so they can add it to their blog/site.
This in itself is a great example of getting something to go viral by *making it about the individual* spreading the message and personally I think these will be the most effective campaigns in the long-term. (See Wedding Crashers’ “Trailer Crashers”:http://www.weddingcrashersmovie.com/crashthistrailer/ for another popular example).
But that’s not my main reason for pointing out Lore’s site.
There are two interesting things we can learn from Cyborg Name Generator…

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Amazon.ca Adds Textbooks

Amazon.ca Announces Textbook Store
It looks like Amazon is getting into back-to-school mode by announcing they’ve added “textbooks”:http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/15115321 to their Canadian site.
It’s interesting to note that they’ve had to make the process of finding books a little more complicated, effectively putting an advanced search on the “Textbook Store main page”:http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/15115321. This is probably too be expected given the obscurity of authors and topics for some required texts, and the duplication of titles in this space (“Introduction to Economics” generates 314 results).
They are also really emphasizing the value of resale by giving half of the page to explaining how you _sell_ your textbooks.
Think about that for a moment – a good chunk of their sales floor is taken up with information on _selling, not buying._ Why might that be?

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