Koka Sexton dot Com

20,000 visitors in a couple days can’t be wrong. My last post was titled Why geeks make better boyfriends. I was searching the interwebs for some information on a future post and came across an old post on the ‘best of Craigslist’ that laid out 15 reasons why Geeks make better boyfriends. Instead of just giving it a thumbs up in StumbleUpon, I thought I would add it to my geek break section as well. I did this because I thought the post was so amusing that it would eventually get lost in my StumbleUpon favorites and I would never see it again. So I found a geeky picture to add to the post and put it up. I specifically put the post in a low level category of my site thinking it was not worth any attention at all. I was wrong.

Blacksmith2 of the StumbleUpon community discovered my post and added it to his favorites. Then the shit storm started brewing. Within a few hours my iPhone was blowing up with emails for me to approve comments on my blog. Initially I thought is was related to my post about becoming a daddy but that failed in comparison to the importance of why geeks are better boyfriends. Thanks to the brazen comment by an anonymous dj41326 everyone started chiming in.

But what I want to understand is this. How can such a meaningless post be so controversial? After reading the comments it is very clear that people have a strict position to hold on the subject. Do we as geeks have such fragile souls that a comment can stoke a flame so large? I mean, I cried watching The Notebook, but that doesn’t make me a wuss does it?

I’ve been reading sites like Super Blogging and DoshDosh and been looking for a way to get my blog posts noticed but is there really a science to it when a random post gets all of the attention when more content rich articles like Everything you ever need to know about Twitter gets so little? I took a look at my copy of the Problogger book to see if he had any insight. There was very little about why a blog post goes viral but they did explain some places of reference for me to understand how this happens.

Photo:http://blaugh.com/

Viral Marketing is uncontrolable

The geeky boyfriend post is a prime example of viral marketing. I think the holy grail to a company is running a successful viral marketing campaign. But is it controllable? I would think that setting a viral fire that swept through social media would be hard to start without throwing some money at the real heavy hitter out there in the industry. But as it seems, I could even do it without even trying.

It is claimed that a satisfied customer tells an average of three people about a product or service he/she likes, and eleven people about a product or service which he/she did not like. Viral marketing is based on this natural human behavior.

The goal of marketers interested in creating successful viral marketing programs is to identify individuals with high Social Networking Potential (SNP) and create Viral Messages that appeal to this segment of the population and have a high probability of being passed along.

I don’t get it but then again, I guess thats the beauty of it. I don’t think people like iJustine who made a funny video was expecting the reaction to her post about a 300 page iPhone bill. What do you know about viral marketing? Give me some insight.

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