Viral Campaigns on Social Networking Websites Can Lead to Sales Leads

Have you heard of Ray Hopewood? A Software Mogul from Silicon Valley that has more money than God and is now running to become the next President of the United States, Hopewood has been all over the place, including most of the major social networking and bookmarking websites.

You haven’t heard of him? Well Hopewood is fake, and I don’t mean in the traditional way a lot of politicians are. He is a creation of Rassak Experience, a online marketing company, for their client BigFix. Hopewood can be found on MySpace, Youtube, Flickr, and on various other social networking websites, all helping to direct traffic to BigFix.com a software company.

The campaign has been a success as detailed by the SFGate, here. By creating a character with an interesting story, they have designed a campaign that uses entertainment with an angle to get attention for BigFix. Deploying profiles on multiple sites, the campaign has led to the company seeing increased traffic to their website. In fact 47% of their total traffic is now coming from StumbleUpon, the social bookmarking website, speaking to the popularity of the content they have created.

Their campaign hasn’t just been about driving traffic, they have garnered over 40 solid sales leads for their software, which is for enterprise users. The campaign has converted traffic into sales and has become a how to lesson on viral marketing.

I think the important lesson to take from this is the fact that they didn’t put all their eggs into one basket, they used multiple platforms to drive their traffic. Also they produced video content and used that successfully, I think video content is becoming vital to any online campaign. It isn’t just about driving sheer numbers through social networking sites, you need hooks in order to get the potential customers to come back or refer the site.

Technorati Tags: Social Networking, Viral Marketing, Ray Hopewood, BigFix, Rassak Experience