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This post is a gentle warning on the unintended consequences of viral marketing.
As head SEM for a B2B website I decided to produce a video of our industrial widgets in a crazy application for which they were not intended. After publishing the video nothing much happened for three months – and then it crossed the tipping point. Overnight our traffic went from 3GB/week to 33GB/week and the number of indexed pages with our trademarked name went from ~800 to over 13,000. I even got a call from a television station that wanted to run a piece on our widget for father’s day.
Four months later the first page of search results for our trademarked name is littered with blog and forum responses to the video and the number of indexed pages has dropped below pre-tipping point levels to about 500. Bandwidth has dropped to 150% of normal but there are still chaotic spikes (as much as 25 GB/day) when some region of the world “discovers” our video.
I suspect a good portion of the bandwidth load has been transferred to third party sites that now host the video without consent. In anticipation of this I placed a prominent bug in the video in hope of encouraging some viewers to search for more information and thus increase our overall ranking via a flood of organic queries. Our SERPs are about the same or better with less fluctuation. Sales have increased although it is unlikely a result of the video.
This isn’t a complaint by any means as I am honored to produce media the masses enjoy. It is just a reminder that once things get published they are out of your hands and there may be some consequences you have not considered.
Chippy
One thing I would say, is that if a set of SERP's were 'littered' with results involving my brand (and if that meant that competition was pushed further down in the SERP's), I'm not sure that would be all bad. ;-)
Anyway, any one else have experiences with unintended, possibly negative consequences of viral efforts that really took off? With video sharing on the rise and social networking on the rise, this might be a topic worth hearing more about.
