One of the greatest things that the internet has done for marketing is provide a way to target the launch of new products to key influencers within specific niches. I’ve seen two really great examples of good viral marketing programs this last month.

Canon has just announced a great new camera (EOS 5D MKII) that not only does still photos but will capture video in full HD. They gave a pre-release version to photographer Vincent Laforet for 72 hours and Vincent produced a great sample movie that he posted on his blog. The net result was 539,380 visitors came to his blog within 4 days to see the movie sample.

Seagate introduced a new portable hard drive and recruited blogger Robert Scoble to promote it. So Scoble, on his blog and Twitter, announced that they would give away 20 of the new drives to anyone that met him in Times Square at 12 noon and then give another 20 away to the people they learned about the contest from. About 50 people showed up and it got a lot of buzz on Twitter that day.

We have a lot of similar stories with clients of LiveWorld (HBO, Campbell’s Soup, Mini-Cooper, TV Guide and others) that have been able to use their relationships in their online communities for specific marketing programs. Please give us a call and we can share more with you.



Scoble at the Times Square give-a-way