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From a Wispa to a Scream
 An experiment in viral marketing: How a marketer told a single contactabout an idea and now receives over 100,000 daily views of their website
Google won’t search for Chuck Norris because it knows you don’t find Chuck Norris, he finds you.
Typing ‘find Chuck Norris’ into the Google search box and clicking ‘I’mFeeling Lucky’ results in a Google error page with this statement boldly displayed. Why though would the leading entrepreneurs in targeted keyword marketingsacrifice valuable advertising dollars for a topical, nonetheless second-rate joke? A more thorough inspection, however, reveals that ‘this page has noaffiliation with Google [and is] created by Arran Schlosberg’, technical director at Australian marketing and brand agency Wispa ( www.wispa.com.au ). This apparent error is in fact an internet-based practical joke intended to create a word-of-mouthphenomenon and test the author’s theories on viral marketing
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.Utilising a technique known as
Google bombing
–involving calculatedexploitation of the way in which Google ranks search results–and informing
onlyone
strategically chosen person of the site’s existence resulted in the single pagenow regularly receiving upwards of 100,000 views daily. Achieving such results with no budget and only a single penetration into the market is seeminglimpossible.The rampant spread of this simple website is epidemic in nature. In hisacclaimed book 
The Tipping Point 
Malcolm Gladwell outlines his ‘three rules of epidemics’: stickiness
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, context and people (in this case a person). The idealcombination, he asserts, will generate and sustain sufficient word-of-mouthmomentum to propel an idea through an audience in much the same way as a virusspreads through a population–hence the term ‘viral marketing’. An idea’s ‘tipping point’ is described as the point in time at which itsdissemination attains enough self-drive to spread unassisted. While the exactsource of the Chuck Norris site’s tip is impossible to pinpoint its timing is clearly 
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The ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button automatically returns the first ranked page for the requested searchterm
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Stickiness refers to the extent to which an idea is remembered by someone encountering it
 
 visible in daily page views–spiking and maintaining constantly high values as of January 25, 2008. While the stickiness and appropriate context of the site are self-evident thequestion of who the single contact was begs to be asked–they are surely a marketingsensation. Unfortunately, they aren’t! A range of other, more pertinent questionsshould rather be posed; what were they told, how were they told and to whom, how and what did they pass on would be more appropriate.The first selection criterion for a contact was that they corresponded directly to the target market of the site
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. This essential condition ensured a commitment topromotion of the site shared by both the creator and the contact. A consequential benefit is a thorough, implicit understanding of marketing strategies that appeal tothe target audience with no required research on the contact’s behalf. Howevereffective utilisation of this invaluable resource was in fact rather counterintuitive. Viral marketing spawned on the premise of Gladwell’s stickiness; if marketers provide their audience with a sufficiently entertaining piece of advertising then they, in turn, will share it with their own contacts whileinadvertently propagating the message
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.This premise lends itself to initialtargeting of those who are most likely to share an idea or message with thosearound them. While this audience is important the Chuck Norris site demonstratesthat there is potentially a more effective initial touch point.Targeting those who will share a message can,
if effective
, result in anexponential spread of an idea. However this approach is only successful oncereaching its own tipping point; prior to this it requires a driving impetus. It was inthis respect that the site’s contact was most valuable. Not only were they informedof the existence of the site but so too were they told exactly what to do with thisinformation–spread the word
in order to achieve the creator’s goal of attaining first place in a relevant Google search
. Given this objective and their inherentcommitment to promote the site–as a personal challenge–they single-handedly provided all the necessary drive to promote the idea.From that point onwards the specifics of what the contact did are irrelevant.By the very nature of their implicit understanding of their target audience they areutilised specifically to take advantage of their already existing participation in themarket. They are essentially a
black box marketing
tool; what they do to promote
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Chuck Norris ‘facts’ gained exposure in popular internet culture and the market may be described as‘internet nerds’
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Given the internet based nature of viral marketing a piece only needs to be sticky enough to give the viewer time to perform a simple act such as forwarding an email yet propagation remains challenging
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