A viral campaign success
Attention PR is a driving force behind one of the most successful viral campaigns, votefortheworst.com. The campaign, conducted for a wireless client, illustrates the grass-roots power of the Internet to swarm mass media and demonstrates the virtuous circle between traditional and new media.
Our campaign speaks loudly to a world in which the user is in greater control.
If you are not among the 40+ million fans of American Idol, then you may not be familiar with Votefortheworst.com (VFTW). VFTW was created in 2004 by a community college professor in Chicago to encourage fans to vote for the most entertaining, if not the best, American Idol. The founder, Dave, fell in love with the train wrecks in the first weeks of the show, and wanted to see the fun continue.
For several years, Dave had some modest success. You will see a picture on the website of last year’s winner, Taylor Hicks, proudly displaying a VFTW t-shirt. However, what turned the site into a cultural phenomenon with 200,000 visitors a day and more than 3,000 inbound links in a short time, is the systemization of word-of-mouth PR we have been perfecting.
The basic process works as such:
- Conduct keyword/keyphrase analysis
- Map keywords to online communities
- Identify community leaders (those most responsible for word-of-mouth)
- Inventory and create community-specific digital assets
- Engage one-to-one through multiple spokespeople (fans, enemies, founder, media, PR pro&)
- Measure
- Optimize
It is a hybrid between online marketing and PR that can be measured through hard metrics such as inbound links, search visibility and traffic, as well as soft metrics such as quality of conversation, quantity of conversation and trends.
So, where does Howard Stern come in? Well, in short, media is media. And all media is digital in the end. The media remains one of the most important influencer groups, but certainly not as influential as they once were. Howard’s subsequent embrace of VFTW arose out of the grass-roots success the site was having. The blogosphere validated the idea. Howard and other media picked-up on the buzz and exploded it. The blogosphere expands on the mainstream media.
More media jumps in. And the cycle continues. Attention PR is simply sharing, pointing and guiding. We saw this relationship occur in a microcosm with PubesAid, and ask everyone to look out for a campaign this spring that should be even bigger.
We communicate authentically. It is really that easy.