Adventures of a Dead Elephant on MySpace

From Frogloop:

Getting a viral campaign to “take hold” is like lighting a fire in the rain. Once blazing, a fire will withstand rain. The problem is how to get it lit in the first place. A blow-torch would be very helpful for this: greater expertise in design and strategy, direct advertising, and a mass email marketing campaign, for starters. Unfortunately, all we could afford was a pack of matches. We budgeted two weeks of keyword buys from Google (resulting in about 700 visits at 10 cents each), and one week of Blog Ads to low-distribution blogs (which have just started running.) We have done one fairly large mailing (3300 recipients) to a list provided by afriend, which generated surprisingly high click-through rate (about 30%). Given that performance, it strikes me that our campaign has suffered a huge opportunity cost in not being able to send large proactive e-mailings to a pre-existing social network.

Web 2.0 News Aggregators Strategy
We also promoted DeadElephant.ORG on several of the largest “people-powered” news networks, including Digg, Care2 News Network, Shoutwire, News.Netscape.com, and Reddit (all show the actual campaign except for Shoutwire and Reddit, which are gone). In fact, the campaign was initially launched on the Care2 News Network. This was a big early success: It was the “hottest” story for about a week, garnering 143 “note-its” and 83 posted comments. That translated to something on the order of a thousand visits to our site, which really got us going. Over on Digg, if your story gets “dugg,” you can receive tens of thousands of visits as a result. However, we could not get any traction on Digg. Digg seems noticeably more right-leaning, more tech-oriented and a more insular culture to penetrate. If we had had more time to build relationships with high-credibility Digg participants and groups, then we might have done better there. The campaign has had meager “take” on Shoutwire, News.Netscape.com, and Reddit. Our story received “votes” and “shouts,” but no significant traffic, probably because traffic on those sites is low to begin with.

Lessons Learned
1.) A MySpace page is not an advertisement - it is the avatar for a person - you.

2.) Create a great web-badge and post it into the comment area of all the friends you gather.

3.) Is your content viral in nature?

4.) Do you have enough edge to cut through the noise?

5.) Target specific segments of the community.

6.) The design quality of your page may not be important.

7.) A MySpace page is not a site – it’s a single page.

In sum, this is a fun way to campaign, but it also requires a lot of work. If you build it, they may come, but more likely you’ll still have to rely on good old fashioned promotion techniques (if there is such a thing as good old fashioned on the web) to get the campaign going, and have content available that people will gladly pass along to their friends.