Archive for the ‘Rocky Mountain Viral’ Category

Viral marketing news and other viral happenings in the Denver Metro and Boulder area.

Apparently, local local site examiner.com is about to hit 30,000 active contributors.  Examiner.com is a grand citizen journalism experiment, backed by Phil Anschutz and based in Denver. I guess with 30,000 contributors, I shouldn’t call it an experiment. If you are not familiar with the site, it is sort of like a cross between 30,000 blogs and a big, fat, digital Sunday newspaper. Contributors write about pretty much everything going on locally and nationally. One of my favorite recent stories covers the appearance of a giant monolith in City Park and written by “Denver Zombie Examiner”, Jessica d’Arbonne. Note that d’Arbonne does make it clear that the monolith is not the work of zombies.

Boulder start-up champion Andrew Hyde hit a nerve last week with a blog post describing how he is committing location based service suicide. His post quickly shot past 100 comments. Not unusual for the Huffington Post, but pretty impressive for a guy from Boulder. By “location based service suicide”, he means that he has stopped “checking in” using services like Foursquare, Brightkite and Gowalla. While each of these has it’s own flavor, all report a user’s current location to his or her network. You should read his post to get his POV – I think he is spot on. I have a nagging concern that I should be more careful with my own personal info, and am disappointed that most social networking services are so cavalier with user’s data. For another insightful perspective on this topic, see this recent post from Read Write Web.

And the cloud of entrepreneurial spirit rising above Denver Metro is a subject of wonder around the world, with recent news that we are now home to more dope dispensaries than Starbucks. And this is definitely not because we are short on Starbucks. I am undecided as to whether this whole thing has a benign or negative impact, but I will say that whatever these guys are smoking isn’t what was around when I was a kid. Quite a motivated bunch.

Office conversation across the country turned to bagels last week, due to a massive Facebook promotion engineered by Lakewood-based Einstein Bros Bagels. Einstein Bros is offering a free bagel and “schmear” in return for following their Facebook Fan Page. Prior to the promotion, Einstein Bros had about 4,700 Fan Page followers. They now have over 358,000! Given the cost of all those bagels, plus the cost of the Facebook ads they ran, they are still well under the $2.5 Million it takes to buy a 30 second Superbowl spot. Maybe that’s not a fair comparison, but I think this is a brilliant campaign. Note that it is difficult to tell if the promotion is still going on, and Einstein Bros didn’t announce an end-date for the promotion. So my apologies if you get there too late.

Lastly, I am sad to repot that the end-times are near. At least that is the argument of “the co-prophet of the end-times”, William Tapley. In a disturbing analysis of murals at DIA, he reveals many prophecies that harken the apocalypse. I wouldn’t have believed it if it weren’t for the substantial evidence he provides. By slowing down the video, I was also able to catch a glimpse of the other co-prophet, no surprise there:

I should point out that we cannot claim Tapley as one of our own. I’m not sure where he lives, but he states that “the long, cold Adirondack winters also afforded me a lot of time.” Some might argue a little too much time, but I find his style entertaining, particularly at a distance.

I will be doing a viral update every week, and welcome any suggestions for topics or items I may have missed.

This is my first effort at a weekly round-up of what’s happening of note in viral and social media in the Colorado Front Range. In general, I will be favoring projects and campaigns that have a big impact on a small budget, but will throw in other stories if I find them particularly interesting.

A highlight of my month was reading local advertising celebrity Alex Bogusky’s attempt at neighborhood detente:

I congratulate you on the turn of phrase, “septic scum.” The vitriol and imagery, and creative use of alliteration more than make up for the fact that it’s a bit redundant.

This is an excerpt from Bogusky’s post: Blogging on Telephone Polls, which has been viewed more than fourteen thousand times since he posted it on January 12th. While I doubt that Bogusky received his recent promotion because of this post, it does make me happier for him.

Another story I love is that of the Gatorade bottles that were modified to display “Unfaithful” labels, featuring Tiger Woods. This prank was executed by Longmont resident Jason Kay, and received a bit of national and international attention. Unfortunately, Kay now faces federal charges for product tampering. He probably helped sell more Gatorade, while also drawing attention to our commercial idolatry of sports figures. In my opinion, everyone wins except for Tiger Woods, so can’t they just drop the charges and stop wasting taxpayer dollars?

“Haiti” is one of the fastest-gaining search terms locally as well as nationally. While the tragedy of what is going on there is beyond description, I am glad to see people wanting to help in so many different ways. In one example, the vibrant Denver/Boulder software community is participating in a remarkable crowdsourcing project called CrisisCamps, where developers from around the world are creating and refining applications and tools that are contributing to the relief effort.

A few videos of local interest have gone hot on YouTube. The first features CU Senior, Paul Robinson. It is a Prana-sponsored mini-documentary of Robinson’s extraordinary climbing talents. Robinson also writes a blog with a strong following in the climbing community. The second is actually a series of videos featuring the National Western Stock Show in Denver, put up by Brad Hook. Hook also promotes the No Bull Auction, in Unionville, Missouri. The auction is a “sexed semen special event”. I really don’t want to know what that is, but Hook’s videos are very well done, and capture a side of American life that most of us don’t see.

And last-but-not-least, former Denver resident Jack (he’s a dog, he doesn’t have a last name) is getting some buzz for the fact that he has been nominated for the 2010 VPI Hambone Award. As prestigious as the award is, this is not the real cause of the buzz. The buzz is because he earned the nomination by almost being eaten by a carnivorous Australian lizard. In general, encounters with bizarre carnivores are an effective, if risky way to get attention.

I’m sure I’ve missed important and/or noteworthy goings-on, so please comment if you know of something I didn’t mention.