Windorphins Again

If the search traffic to this blog is anything to go by for my previous article on the eBay campaign, the Windorphin campaign by eBay is definitely generating success, that is people looking for the term and trying to find out what the ads mean. Or it could have something to do with the fact they were running an instant win promotion to get up to $1000 that finished on July 1.

The official announcement had this to say as well:

And if you live in Boston, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, or Los Angeles, or read national magazines like People, Us, Time, or Newsweek (among others), keep your eyes out for more buzz about windorphins.

I’m not sure what that means, as there is little buzz in the usual places that indicates they did things in these cities..anyone see anything?

An interesting aside, read this story from Rick Munarriz from Motley Fool, who attended a press conference with ebay, heard the term Windorphins and proceeded to register the domain, thinking that it was a cool term they had used, not that they were planning on doing anything with it. The lesson here – don’t let your executive talk about words you have invented without registering them first – even if you have no intention of using them now, you may want to later.

The story also gives an starting point to measure the success of the windorphin meme – in mid-may, there was still only one reference in Google to the term Windorphins, currently there are over 33000. But comparing Blog Search to general search, it seems to be a campaign that is reported on more than talked about on blogs.

So what is the success factor here? There’s an definite indication that the term is being reported on and being searched for, so awareness looks like it is high. But is it being tied into the eBay brand? That’s the biggest challenge when doing this kind of branding exercise. When you hit the site, the branding is subtle but pervasive, so I think there will be connections made.