Deft Creative Articles

Christmas 2006 - A viral Case Study

January 3rd, 2007

Introduction

Each Christmas, rather than send out paper cards to clients and contacts we try to create a festive Flash game to get everyone in the spirit a couple of weeks before Christmas.

This year, our Jumping Rudolf game got so much interest we thought it would be useful to write a case study, explaining a bit about why and how it was played by so many different people, as an introduction to the viral marketing concept.

It was initially sent out to 100 people on our contacts list, but the nature of viral marketing meant that within days, thousands more people were playing it. The term “viral” refers to the way in which users pass things like Flash games and funny video clips on to their friends and colleagues, causing them to spread exponentially. If one person sends it to 10 of their contacts, and each of those 10 send to 10 of their own and so on, the potential reach is incredible. The trick is to create something that people naturally want to tell others about.

For anyone who hasn’t yet seen it, here’s a link to it

Helping the spread

To give the game a little more exposure, we decided to give the main character, Rudolf, a profile on MySpace. It was surprising how many people wanted Rudolf as their friend, so we soon found that Rudolf had lots of friends, and lots of people playing his (our!) game.

The profile was very basic, it simply invited people to join in the festive fun and play the game.

We then announced the game on a couple of viral announcement lists, basically a newsletter that anyone can submit to. From doing this the game was picked up on a couple of viral charts, the top positions reached are shown below. Click the images for a closer look…

    

We received a few emails from people asking if it would be OK to inlclude the game in their own newsletter mail-out. Of course, this was fine by us, that’s what the viral concept is all about; one person emailing the item to many.

About a week after it’s launch we did a back-link check to see how many other websites were linking back to the game. There were quite a few discussion forums mentioning the game and discussing one another’s scores etc. A couple of notable ones are given below:

http://www.damsels.org/forum/
http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com

Results and statistics

Based on 16 days exposure:

Plays: 256,000
Average plays per person: 13.4
Unique people who played: 19,100
New visitors on Christmas day itself: 1,155
Reached number 3 in the Christmas viral chart and number 9 in the Killboard viral chart.

Approximate breakdown of referrers

Email distribution: 75%
Forums and blog discussion: 10%
Viral charts/game sites: 10%
MySpace profile: 5%

Conclusion

The game itself was very simple, which I think helped it get as far as it did. With all these things if the idea is good then people will pass it on and link to it. The game was frustrating enough to encourage people to play more than once and even return later on.

Viral marketing like this is something that we will continue to do again and again because it is just so effective. The main two measures for us on this game was brand exposure and newsletter sign-ups, both of which performed very well, more than any other marketing we do.

If you want to discuss a viral marketing campaign of your own, just drop us an email and we’ll brainstorm some ideas with you. It’s a fun and effective way of marketing and it really does work.

Entry Filed under: Website Marketing, Viral Marketing