I wrote a piece today that raises some interesting questions. Have methods of viral distribution spread widely enough so that an online word-of-mouth campaign can bypass techie bloggers? The MSN Found campaign — slammed by Scoble and dissed by other bloggers — is aimed at mainstream consumers. It doesn’t have RSS distribution, it doesn’t allow videos to be downloaded, and the “blogs” are fake (though in their defense, they are designed to be fake, from characters in an ongoing narrative).
So if early-adopter techie bloggers find MSN Found uninteresting, is that it? Does the meme go no further? Or will e-mail “forward to a friend” and more mainstream (read: teen diary) blogging save the day for MSN? Time will tell, I suppose. MSN isn’t talking about it and they’ll probably only spill if it’s eventually successful, but one wonders whether this will become one of those cautionary tales of online marketing gone wrong (like Raging Cow).
UPDATE: MSN responds to the Found controversy via its blog, saying it’s going to add RSS feeds though “very few updates” to the campaign are planned. Kudos to the firm for acknowledging the discussion that’s been going on.
UPDATE2: Scoble apologizes.
As viral as a splinter
Online Media Daily reports that MSN Search has started a “viral campaign” created by an agency called 42 Entertainment. But I don’t get what’s viral about it. The main page, MSNFound, aggregates six phony blogs supposedly written by a demographically-a…
MSN Slips with Fake Blogs
MSN Search has launched a series of RSS-feedless blogs featuring fictitious users. Pamela Parker sums up why this is such a bad idea. If they were smart, the MSN Search team would respond to this criticism on their weblog. Sigh.
Doesn’t viral mean that people want to spread it? “Wow, this is cool… check it out…” Those MSN Found videos are lame, unfunny, and lead to nothing interesting… So, they won’t spread.
As viral as a splinter
Online Media Daily reports that MSN Search has started a “viral campaign” created by an agency called 42 Entertainment. But I don’t get what’s viral about it. The main page, MSNFound, aggregates six phony blogs supposedly written by a demographically-a…
Good point, Richard. That’s always been the rub with viral contant — you’ve gotta make something worth passing on.
This just goes to show you how important it is to “listen” to your members and act on their input. A lot of companies put together Web communities, only to ignore their community members. The whole point is to create a dialog and use the valuable member input to make better business decisions.