Faster, Viral marketing, Kill! Kill! When viral marketing is unexpected

On the 9^th of August an “Haiti UFO” video appeared on Youtube. About 5 million people saw it in the last month. Apart from the debate about the ”authenticity”, online users started wondering whether was or wasn’t a viral marketing campaign. The UFOs look very similar to the spaceships in the upcoming Halo 3 videogame; it can’t be a coincidence, most people said.

The video maker (after a while it turned out that the video is fake, a French guy admitted he made it with V3 3D program) said there’s no viral “factor” in it, just a software experiment, in which he was probably inspired by the game. Intended or not, the campaign worked for the videogame, increasing the hype around its release.

On the other side, in late 2006 an amateur video appeared on Youtube, with a guy making a rap song about the hysterical need of a Playstation Portable for Christmas. A blog connected to it was also opened. Online communities took a few days to discover the fake: the website was related to a marketing company called Zipatoni. The gamers community felt underestimated and betrayed by Sony, and a huge word of mouth about the video and the blog started spreading, damaging the image of the company.

Sony apologized on the blog itself.

Busted. Nailed. Snagged. As many of you have figured out (maybe our speech was a little too funky fresh???), Peter isn't a real hip-hop maven and this site was actually developed by Sony. Guess we were trying to be just a little too clever. From this point forward, we will just stick to making cool products, and use this site to give you nothing but the facts on the PSP.

Sony Computer Entertainment America

The attitude of online communities regarding viral marketing is changing: they are very suspicious, investigating everything. Working on viral marketing platforms (mostly using web 2.0 like Youtube or Tudou) can be really profitable (and cheap) but also very dangerous, if the campaign is made hiding the real objective of it. At least, if you really have to hide, do it right.

here's Sony campaign: