Viral Marketing

Art Director Erin Bennett has a nice little thing going at her blog, www.gigglechick.com. She's currently running a campaign to acquire a Big Bertha driver. Pretty clever, but it doesn't match the $1,000+ she's already raised for the Mini Cooper convertible.

Interesting ideas. But not from the standpoint of getting folks to give money on a whim...we do that every day. What's a $1, right?

Not long ago, I stopped getting a number of e-newsletters and began subscribing to RSS feeds of business and news topics which interest me. Often these feeds are aggregated sources of news and I'll occasionally come across an article that I think I want to read, but it's behind a sign up page. Such was the case last night when I was catching up on the headlines and wanted to read an article on Credit Card Marketing that appeared in the LA Times.

After I finished the article, it occurred to me that newspapers should leverage this approach to drive subscriber leads.

Apparently protests from a number of safety groups have caused GM to pull it's latest Guy Ritchie-directed Corvette commercial showing a boy dreaming about driving a Corvette.

The ad's pretty benign and GM is big enough to have weather what would have been a short-lived protest. Yet the way the spot's been circulating around the web, it'll probably be seen by more people wanting to see for themselves why it was pulled than would have seen it on the airwaves.

What a great way to turn publicity, GM. Great viral marketing.