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If you’ve developed a great viral idea and now want the world to know about it, where do you start? A talented social media expert named Kate has written an article full of great seeding ideas. It’s definitely worth a read.

Photo credit: pictoscribe

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Playland, a Vancouver-based amusement park, has just released an amusing microsite called Scream-O-Meter. Visitors are dared to scream as loud as they can in order to win a Playland discount.

Rethink, the agency responsible for this piece, has done a great job creating a microsite that’s closely tied to the Playland experience (people screaming out of fear…or fun).

I just wish they would have added a “challenge your friend” function. It would have been fun to see which one of my friends could scream the loudest or longest. To help spread the message, they should have also allowed visitors to record their scream and email it to friends. A link to the Playand website would have been nice as well.

What do you think?
Use the stars rating below to rank this viral.

There are a few things worth mentioning about BMW’s new microsite. The first is how clean and easy it is to use.

The second thing I want to point out is their tell-a-friend option. Although they are not the first to do it, I really like the idea of allowing the sender to customize a template email with personal information about the recipient.

While it makes the email a lot more personal for the recipient, BMW receives the biggest benefit. Each time somebody sends an email, BMW learns valuable information about the sender and the receiver. For example, BMW is able to collect the sender’s gender, the recipient’s gender and the recipients car model. Crafty!

Trade show tactics by Seth Godin
Great idea for a trade show promotion to spread the word about Squidoo.com.

Paper, Rocks, Scissors
Fun little promotion where people play Rock Paper Scissors with the cashier to win a discount on their food.

Society of the Ancients
A great summary of how one campaign used a website and a street promotions to successfully confuse a lot of people.

When viral attacks
Although this was an unintended viral, it quickly turned out to be a Halo 3 nightmare for one college student. Apparently, the newly named “Iris” marketing campaign contained an innocent gamer profile, which had a ten-digit number resembling a phone number. Ironically, the phone number belongs to an unsuspecting student majoring in marketing and advertising.

If your marketing budget doesn’t have room for a celebrity endorsement try recruiting a YouTube contributor with a respectable following. They’re probably cheaper than Vanilla Ice and might even have a bigger chance of bringing in thousands of eyeballs.

MTV has recently recruited a mini-celeb duo via the CakeGroup to promote their global warming campaign.

Believe it or not, some YouTube members have developed quite the following. If you visit the Channel tab, you can quickly learn which members have the largest number of subscribers. For example, “crazyutubefreak2” has over 3,000 subscribers and a 15 year old kid named Bernice has 4,568 subscriber (and growing). That’s over 4,000 people that want to be notified every time Bernice posts something new! One of his videos has been seen by over 32,000 people.

I wonder if Bernice would talk about a product in exchange for a Playstation 3?

Speaking of selling out, here is an interesting article on this issue.

BigFix has recently launched a viral marketing campaign that revolves around a fake presidential hopeful named Ray Hopewood. Check out this San Francisco Chronicle article for more details.

In an attempt to make Hillary Clinton more approachable and a little less stiff, her campaign strategists have released a Sopranos parody video to help promote the official campaign song.

Unfortunately, the video is as stiff and unnatural as Hillary is in front of a large crowd. Even the usually smooth Bill Clinton looks awkward. As for the content of this boring spoof, it’s like a joke without a punchline. You basically spend almost two minutes watching two famous people have a boring conversation. There’s absolutely no payoff at the end.

This YouTube post is a lesson in what not to do in a viral video. It’s definitely a far cry from President Clinton Last Days in Office.

For a statistical analysis on the presidential YouTube race, check out this Washington Post article.

By the way, the official song is performed by a fellow Canuck - Celine Dion.

If your viral concept can’t be reduced to something simple, you have two options. Develop a new concept or find a way to offset the majority of the work to the viral’s recipients.

People are more likely to fill something out if their friends ask them - rather than a corporation.

If you put too much burden on the virus spreader, you stand a strong chance of turning that person off. Make it simple for the spreader to spread. Offer the spreader the most amount of benefit for the least amount of effort.

An example of this would be a long personality quiz. Instead of having the spreader fill out the quiz, why not give the spreader the option to ask other people to fill it out for him/her. The concept will change slightly, but the virality should increase.

Photo by: Clav

The fact that a local radio station is conducting a celebrity look alike contest is not noteworthy. However, what’s interesting is how they structured the prizes.

The look-alike winner gets $10,000 (and a little fame), but one lucky voter will be awarded a $14,000 prize! It’s actually more valuable (and easier) to voice your opinion than it is to be a contestant.