Thresher's Viral Voucher Could Cost Big Money this Christmas

UK wine merchant Thresher allowed their vouchers to go “wild”. The 40% discount voucher, which was seeded on the website of South African wine company Stormhoek and was downloaded more than 800,000 times prior to it hitting the mainstream news.

The offer was originally intended for Thresher’s suppliers and staff, according to one BBC report but proliferated virally by email, and blogging.

The influx of visitors brought their server crashing to its knees and the story was immediately covered by mainstream UK media. The media coverage appears to have been a disaster recovery strategy as they appear to be in fear of their bottom line profitability. While the raised brand awareness will be most welcome, its uncertain how much this will cost Thresher’s in lost revenue, due to the seasonal offer of 40% discounted drinks.

Ah well…. millions of pounds worth of free media publicity, just before Christmas is quite a result, especially given it all appears to have happened without the help of a viral advertising agency.

Let this be a reminder of the power of really simple viral marketing.

AdultTube / XTube - making it big!!

AdultTube / XTube appears to be making it big with multiple viral components used to blend modern social media optimisation (YouTube style viral widgetization) and good old fashioned webmaster affiliate incentives. These influencing factors plus erm.. natural human curiosity appear to be driving viral growth of adult social media site

Currently ranked as 1,163th most visited (Alexa.com).


The alexa 'Daily Reach' graph below shows the consistent growth over the past 6 months and without much sign of slowing down. I expect this trend to continue, while sub 1000 postitions are becoming harder to achieve AdultTube/XTube has the viral model and user demand to keep running onwards and upwards.

Lastminute.com - bad review on YouTube.com let's see how it spreads

I came across a negative viral video posted by an unhappy Lastminute.com customer Jimmybick who appears to be quite unhappy about his stay in Marrakech. One thing is for sure, bad reviews which make it to social media wont go away very easily.

This unhappy customer posted 3 videos of his bad holiday experience with Lastminute.com

1. Lastminute.com Marrakech holiday nightmare -- shower
   
2. Lastminute.com Marrakech holiday nightmare -- phone
3. Lastminute.com Marrakech holiday nightmare -- hairdryer

Let's track the growth of a random travel related bad news viral on YouTube.com

• Shower (2 page views - as of today)
  
• Phone (26 page views - as of today)
  
• Hairdryer (209 page views - as of today)

I'll keep returning to these YouTube videos and let you know how much it grows over the next year or two. I'm particularly interested to see if there's any consistent growth, either linear or geometric.

If Lastminute.com would like to comment here, then please feel free. Meanwhile I'll be tracking the growth or decline in the spread of this particular holiday nightmare

Superbreak Feedburner Experiment

As a little experiment in getting feedburner.com pages ranked and indexed, I burned a feed using interview content tagged with the term Superbreak (http://pheedback.com/superbreak) ensuring the Superbreak brand term was included in the feedburner URL.

Now…I’ll leave it to the spiders and we’ll see how it ranks.