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Case Study - Viral Marketing Drives People To Drink

According to Wikipedia, Viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness...it can harness the network effect of the Internet and can be very useful in reaching a large number of people rapidly.

Apparently it can convince people that they should drink coffee processed from cat excrement, too.

No kidding.

While the behavior of these cat - poop - drinkers would provide hours of blogging entertainment as a subject all its own, we are delving into this sensational stunner to speak to a larger point. Some argue that it's a decaying rather than a compounding function. But for purposes this article, we'll maintain that when strategically planned and executed, viral marketing can have wild implications for your business.

Okay, okay, first we'll dish the dirt:

Jim Cone is owner of 'Coffee and Tea Limited' located at the Mall of America here in Minnesota. Jim is offering the most expensive (and arguably the most bizarre ) type of coffee in the world - java roasted from beans already partially digested from Indonesian civet cats. The beans are retrieved from the excrement, thoroughly washed and roasted at about 420 degrees. 'Kopi Kuwak." Is the name.

Jim Cone told CBS News: "...It's a very rich, ah, cup of coffee, very chocolaty, ah, actually a carmelly taste around the bottom of your tongue."

No kidding!

I live in Minnesota. And I love coffee. Rarely seen without it, actually. But like the good search marketer, I retrieve my news from Google, and am often times more interested in upcoming mergers in 2007 than I am in what my local news station has to offer. (Perhaps this simply means I don't observe the news as much as I should...) In either case, I usually get a good amount of current events from my clients during the day, and, needless to say, several of them came callin' on the coffee lady's cell today with 'You won't believe what I heard this morning....'

Again, like a good search marketer, what do you suppose was the first thing I did?

Technorati.

How many people have blogged about this? And...how did they find out about it?

Google.

What news stations reported on this besides the one in my home town?

Digg.

Who read these news stories and submitted them?

Is this a case of viral marketing, and could it become a marketing pandemic? We're not sure yet. But by asking these questions, the evolution from simple story to marketing pandemic can be tracked, analyzed and recreated in order to harness the power of viral marketing.

Let's take a look at how this viral marketing fairy tail begins...

1. Like most brand awareness, It starts with PR. Once upon a time, a local news station reports this story on the evening news. This of course is not viral marketing per say, rather public relations, but could arguably called the 'first falling domino.'

1. Mainstream Media Teams up with Word of Mouth. I'm not a fan of radio in Minneapolis, but that doesn't mean other people aren't. Apparently the KS95 served up this steaming hot cup of a story on their morning show, and two of my co workers caught the whiff. My interest is peeked. I've caught something.

1. The most powerful and far reaching media giant grabs hold...the Internet! No medium has grown faster than the Internet. With an estimated 175 billion users online, and with 90% of those being search engine users, the internet has become the bloodline that carries these marketing viruses. Like the rest of America, I turned to the internet and found that:

1. Technorati returned 1,458 results for blogs containing the term 'kopi luwak.'
2. Of those 1,458 results, just under 20 were posts directly relating to this purveyor out of Minnesota, and 11 were submitted just in the last 2 days since this story broke.
3. Most of these 11 bloggers cited word of mouth as their information source.
4. Apparently out of those bloggers, none are search engine marketers or savvy web 2.0 techies, because as yet, no social content sharing network has picked up this gem.

This is where the story becomes on-belay. If web 2.0 decides they like the story, (that's content sharing networks personified) if its worth sharing, we just might have even more to report on. I'm sure Hubby, who also works in web, will have plenty to say to his coworkers after he finds out his his Lady was home from work late because she was at the Mall of America drinking a cuppo-cat-poo.

No kidding.

We are going to follow this story, and we want you to participate. Email this story to two people. Submit it to Digg. Think we're self interested? Find the news story on CBS and submit that. Drop us a line and let us know how many people you infected. A few quadratic equations later, we'll be back to demonstrate the exponential power of viral marketing, the internet, and web 2.0

*Author's Note: Even if you're convinced that viral marketing can do wonders for a business (just ask Jim Cone - I'm going to when I patronize his Coffee shop tonight.) the larger question remains: "Yes, sure...but how can I make viral marketing work for my business?"

Although most e-businesses are have launched or are planning to launch viral marketing campaigns, there is one obstacle that prohibits marketers from reproducing them successfully.

Many marketers have trouble identifying what kind of information rivets audiences, and more importantly, what prompts that audience to pass along that information either by word of mouth, or via the internet. Using a meme tracker can help to identify relevant and viral quality topics.