Wouldn’t it be nice if your audiences spontaneously decided to spread the word about your brand? That recently happened to us when an internal resource we created spread among the design community via social media, increasing our website traffic by a factor of ten.

Reverse engineering is a time-honored tradition, so we examined the events and came up with a successful strategy for creating a viral marketing campaign and a great example of how social media can work for marketing.

Anatomy of a viral campaign

Last year we created a resource for our designers and posted it on our website for easy access. The “sizer,” as we dubbed it, was a guide to common browser sizes based on screen resolution statistics. When popular design blogger Swiss Miss twittered about browser stats last fall, Account Manager Royal Stuart thought she might be interested in the sizer and responded with a link.

The link caught her attention, and Swiss Miss posted about the sizer on her blog several days later. Word spread quickly. Before long, the sizer was mentioned on another popular design blog, Konigi, and Smashing Magazine included a link in its “Fresh Bookmarks” sidebar. (No permalink, but here’s a screengrab.) Numerous other blogs, forums, and Twitterers also picked it up. Within a week we were huge in Japan, and there were nearly 500 links on delicious.com. (Read Royal’s account of the sizer’s viral spread on his blog.)

The jaw-dropping part came when we looked at our website traffic over this period. In the month following Swiss Miss’ post, our traffic increased about ten times over the average. For the next few months, traffic was about four times higher than average.

What did we gain?

Increased website traffic. The sizer drove more traffic to our site than all other promotion and PR we’ve done in the last year combined. (Read more about driving traffic to your site in June’s M_dash.)
Publicity and positioning. Every post and tweet spread our name and positioned us as a design leader, and continues to do so.
Dozens of links to our site. Links are the currency of the Internet. Every link improves our ranking in search engine results.
Quality feedback. Comments posted on the various blogs pointed out ways we could make the sizer better. The Web Canvas, our new-and-improved version of the sizer, incorporates many of these suggestions, making it more useful to us and to others.

What made this a good virus?

Of course, the sizer’s rapid spread wouldn’t have happened without Swiss Miss’s endorsement. But, as the saying goes, “Good luck happens when preparedness meets opportunity.” The sizer took off because a couple things were already in place:

First, we were already participating in social media. Royal knew Swiss Miss might be interested in our sizer because he followed her on Twitter and knew exactly when she was thinking about browser stats. The lesson here: Opportunities present themselves if you pay attention to what people are talking about. Stop trying to figure out how to use social media and just participate.

Second, and more important, we shared something that was useful and interesting to others. Since we needed a tool like this ourselves, it’s no surprise others were interested. The lesson: Tie your message to something people want and they will spread it for you. That something could be a useful tool like the sizer, an interesting article, or an entertaining video. If it has obvious value, it will be shared.

Engineering a better viral campaign

Even though this virus worked out very well for us, we would have done a few things differently if we’d started out with the intention of creating a viral campaign. If we created a tool that appealed to our client base rather than our peers, that spike in traffic might have translated more directly into new business opportunities.

But this example demonstrates one way a business can get attention by creating a branded resource or tool and sharing it with the public. If the resource is truly useful, then it will find its way to the right audience and drive traffic to a website, increase name recognition, reinforce the brand, gather feedback from the market, or more.

Drop us a line if you’d like to find out how Methodologie can help you create your own virus, in the form of a branded tool for your audience.

Read more about the Web Canvas, or learn more about using social media (The Rules of Social Media Fight Club) on our website.