Viral Marketing: Learn from the Best (and Worst)

Viral marketing is one of the most effective ways to use the power of the internet to establish your company's brand.

We believe that one of the best ways to learn techniques like viral marketing is to analyze the successes (and failures) of others. To get you started on the right path, this thread will periodically be updated with different real-life examples of well executed (and not so great) viral marketing:

Warner Brothers and the Dark Knight
Warner Brothers launched an extremely creative and effective viral marketing campaign for their latest Batman movie.

The campaign started with the Dark Knight homepage. When users clicked the picture on this page, they were taken to a second page with a single graphic in support of Harvey Dent (the District Attorney in the Dark Knight movie). What happened next was the real beauty of this campaign...

Although it is no longer available, a third web site popped up. It contained the same picture as the previous web site, but this time it was defaced by the Joker.



After a few seconds, visitors to this site were prompted to enter their email address. By doing this, the user would receive an email with the coordinates of a specific pixel and a link to enter the coordinates. Once the coordinates were entered, that pixel would be removed from the image. The final result was:



So, why is this an amazing example of viral marketing? Not only did it give Warner Brothers a lot of targeted email addresses, but it also encompassed all the traits that define successful viral marketing. Not only did it incorporate a fun, trendy concept, but it forced users to spread the word about the site. Since users could only remove one pixel, it was in their best interest to spread the word to their friends and on blogs/forums/web sites that are related to the Dark Knight.