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…
Category: Viral Marketing
Viral Privacy Violation?
Published August 26, 2005
A sex appeal test making the rounds via email raises ethical questions about privacy violations in viral marketing.
Comments closedObserved: URLs Gone Wild
Published August 23, 2005
I still kick myself for not following through on an idea for a book I had during the early days of the Dotcom boom. I had been on a business trip to San Francisco – arguably the epicentre of the Internet ‘gold rush’ – and while I was there I started to notice all the unusual places that URLs were plastered.
Sure, people were promoting ‘MyGoofyBusinessIdea.com’ on billboards and posters, but creative (or maybe desperate) marketers were also putting their URLs on other, uh, interesting things. Had I been more on the ball at the time, I would have started documenting this phenomenon with my camera.
Even without photographic evidence, I still thought it would be beneficial, even inspirational, to share with One Degree readers some of the more memorable places I’ve seen URLs advertised over the years.