ez.spikesource.com — April 2006

Finally these guys get their acts together and get Speener's Place out the door. Speener's Place is a picture blog that features whiteboard art by our Alex Cheung (Man-on-Can) and comments from our Ed Espino (IV Dude).

What I like about it is that it gives an honest portrait of what happen day-to-day in Spikesource. Things are funny at time, tense at another, but never a dull moment. Regardless what happen, you can see from here and here that we are all passionate about what we do, sometime to the extreeme. In fact "being passionate" is the number one rule that is asked from us by our founder and CTO, Murugan Pal.

If a reasonably good hosting cost $100 a month, and a good design cost $1000 on your Master Card, high traffic and visibility are certainly priceless. When journalism was done exclusively on paper, PR firms were often the only resource people tap to get visibility. These days, there are several new tools that are available in the shop. If you master these tools, the result can be rewarding. Here is an observation on three reasonably successful internet campaigns. We shall see what we can learn from them. Here are the three campaigns:

1. Axosoft

Hamid Shojaee, one of the founders of Axosoft, decided to run a campaign experiment by tapping the power of blogroll. More than just promoting for the visibility of his company, he made a smart move to increase the install base of his product as well. He decided that he would give away his product for a price that is better than free. For 3 days, he offered one of his product, Axosoft’s OnTime Small Team Edition, for $5 a copy, and donated all the proceeds to the American Red Cross.

The offer was certainly compelling. With Katrina still at the back of everyone's mind, giving away $5 to the Red Cross seemed to be the right thing to do. The extra piece of software feels like a free super-size for your Mc Donnald's meal.

Now, the challenge is the campaign. Shojaee decided to seed his campaign by asking a prominent Web 2.0 blogger, Microsoft's Robert Scoble to post a story about the offer. Shojaee also decided to post his page in Digg, a social news aggregation site.

Despite an initial slow start, he testified that in 3 days everything felt like a jackpot:

• Axosoft, sold 2,633 units ($1.3 Million retail value) of its flagship product, OnTime
• Axosoft’s name was making headlines in the blogosphere and web sites all around the world
• Energy and motivation almost visibly swirled through our halls
• Axosoft owed the American Red Cross a check for over $14,000.

Lesson:

• Remember Google's law: highly authoritative site (Scoble's blog) brings traffic to sites that they link to. So if you can get your story to be mentioned in some highly visible sites then success is nearby.
• For a good cause, your audience may be willing to do something for you, including buying something.

2. Helpwinmybet

This past weeks, I have been watching an internet campaign that was initiated by some guy calling himself Jim. He launched a site on the 14 of March, and by the 6th of April, he has received more than 2 million hits on his site. The content: A plea for hits so that he can win a bet from his girlfriend. The price: a threesome, him, his girlfriend an stranger. Strategy: word of mouth and social bookmarking.

Aside from fame, self pat-on-the-back, and the promise of a threesome, I believe that his website was actually generating some revenue for him. At one point he had a paypal donation link, which he removed before too long. He is now running some advertisements on his site.

Well, as I mentioned, he won the hits that he asked for in only 3 weeks. Now that he met his goal, a looming problem creeps in: how to sustain the sweet high-volume traffic. Jim has proved to be quite cunning, actually. He posted updates on the story of the selection of the girl to join the threesome. He also created a forum for his audience to interact with each other and help decide the selection of the third wheel.

These strategies have proved to be successful for some time. However, Jim knows well that as soon as there is closure to his story, he would receive zip amount of traffic. He needs to brew something real fast before he looses his audience. Well, here is the latest improvement as of the time I am writing this. He claimed that his girlfriend refuted his victory, and they started a new bet: he needs to get 74,251,867 hits by July 1, 2007.

Very clever, Jim! Now you have a cash cow until next year. I am not sure if you can keep your audience interested for that long, and I don't know what new thing you are going to brew by then. Anyway good luck...

Here is a few interesting statistics as of today:

• 3,256,372 hits on his website
• 19,900 Google hits on keyword "helpwinmybet"
• 140 bookmarks in del.icio.us
• 614 diggs in digg

Lessons:

• Old Marketing Mantra: Sex sells...
• Be controversial, especially if you are relying on worth of mouth only
• Refresh your contents: His traffic was slowing down when he paused to post updates.
• Involve your audience: Jim made a smart move by adding a forum to his site. This way, Jim's audience are bound to come back to his site.

3. Milliondollarhomepage

So this smart chap from England, Alex Tew, contemplated about how to rake a lot of money to pay for noble things, like his education, and not-so-noble things, like a new car. One night he was enlightened; he decided to open a website, with one-million-pixel worth of real estate, and to sell them for $1 each. He promised to keep the site up for at least 5 years.

After getting a few buys from relatives and friends, he hired a PR firm to run stories everywhere. The strong story seeds, coupled with a strong buzz about of this dude, barely legal to consume alcoholic drinks, making a million dollar, propels his site to extreme visibility. Soon after that, money poured to Alex's account like water pouring from a broken dam.

Here are a few interesting results:

• His did receive his million dollar, tuition money and all, and he was even blackmailed. Talking about being a celebrity...
• Numerous pixel ad sites pop out every day. According to pixelsitelinks.com, there are more than 2525 of them as of now.
• Google hit on query "pixel ad": 16,600,000

Lessons:

• Novel/controversial ideas are valuable, and contagious
• Traditional PR campaign still work
• Good PR + word of mouth = deadly

Conclusion:

Blogs and social bookmarking sites are new powerful tools for internet campaigns. They help to spread the words very fast. If you have something interesting that people want to read, you just need to toss them to the air, and the wind will pick it up.

Allow your audience to interact with you and with each other. That gives reason for them to keep coming back, and to spread the noise.

Controversial contents may help you get bursts of traffic, but they are not sustainable. If you want a good consistent stream of traffic, then you have to keep renewing or adding your content with quality materials. There is no other shortcut for that.