Links and Things

These are just a few links I have found while looking for information on viral marketing and designing for mobile phones while surfing the web.

Viral Marketing
This is a link to an article on generating interest in a product or event using viral marketing techniques. It has some good strategies on how to manage a viral campaign, such as how to keep track of what people are saying about you (good or bad) by keeping an eye on blog comments and messageboards via RSS feeds. It also goes into some detail on the technique of link baiting, the proccess of assessing how link-worthy your content is and attracting the right kind of people who will link to you, thus maximising traffic through using your audience.

The second link is a blog post on what it means for something to be viral. One of the main things I drew from this was that the ideas behind a lot of viral adverts are quite shallow, most of the time out of necessity, as things which are easy to understand and instantly entertaining are going to be much quicker to spread around that something thought provoking which takes time to sink in.

Designing for Mobile Devices
These two links focus mostly on the technical side of designing for small screens such as those of mobile phones. The first is a link to Mike Davidson's blog, where he suggests four easy steps that will create a mobile version of your site. I found the image comparisons half way through the article quite interesting. They were from sites which I would have expected to already have used mobile friendly technology, especially Gizmodo, but I guess that goes to show how under-developed and underused this technology is. The second link deals with compatibility, and shows how certain tags and page elements are displayed on verious devices. It has some pretty useful tips on how to make your site easy to use on a mobile device.

The Six Principles of Viral Marketing

This article is about the main principles of viral marketing. It provides good guidelines for creating a viral marketing campaign, along with information about what you can hope to achieve from doing so.

Among the information given in the article are useful things such as:

Viral marketers practice delayed gratification. They may not profit today, or tomorrow, but if they can generate a groundswell of interest from something free, they know they will profit "soon and for the rest of their lives"...

which explains that the payoff of a viral marketing campaign will not be short term thing, but when it finally comes around, it will be more than worth the effort put in.

I found the article useful when considering how to go about creating a viral marketing campaign, as it clearly highlights the differences between viral and ordinary campaigns.

ilovebees: An Example of Viral Marketing

ilovebees was a marketing campaign for the release of 'Halo 2' a highly anticipated video game. It took the form of an Alternate Reality Game, or 'ARG'. Typically these games see people from all over the world working together to harvest information from fake websites. They generate an unbelievable amount of publicity, and really draw the participants into the world of the product that they are publicising.

ilovebees was a cross-media experience that drew on the internet for the production of fake websites, as well as emailing, and even phone communication with characters from the game world. The game sparked interest when the url 'www.ilovebees.com' was displayed at the end of an early trailer for Halo 2. From here, players of the game unravelled the secrets held within that site and many others to reveal a complicated story full of twists and turns. The ultimate payoff of the game is that participants were invited to special locations to play the game before it was released to the public.