Internet Marketing Tycoon

**joerandom** · 07:35 PM

Well, my voicemail provider gotvmail has broken into the blogosphere mainstream with a series of inane videos starring the usually inane Gary Busey. For those of you who have been living under a rock, you can see them here

www.garybuseyonbusiness.com

My question is -- yes, it's a great branding exercise, but I think one of the downsides to viral campaigns is that there's no real seo or traffic advantages. Most of the videos are hosted on youtube, so that doesn't help. Granted, they're getting the company name in front of eyeballs, which is great, but I think that for web-based companies viral video-type campaigns don't make a whole lot of sense -- a lot of effort, a high risk, and a low return.

From a purely webmaster perspective what are the advantages to something like this?

edit: I forgot to mention that I bring it up not to slander the campaign above, but because now the company *I* work for is trying to develop something similar, and I'm trying to explain to them that it will probably not work...

**eautocad** · 07-30-2008, 11:59 PM

I don't particularly care for "viral" marketing, because to me it synthetic.

**EdTheil** · 08-01-2008, 05:03 AM

Hey Joerandom,
Put your signature in your profile so you get links. Viral marketing works when applied correctly and with out spamming. Good Luck

**eautocad** · 08-01-2008, 01:56 PM

How does viral marketing relate to signature links?

**vangogh** · 08-01-2008, 04:05 PM

This may come as a shock, but not every piece of marketing you do has to result in direct traffic or SEO benefits. Branding is far more important than both.

If your ideas or your name reaches enough people those people start talking more and more about you. Your ideas stick and conversations develop around them. Eventually most of those conversations lead back to you. Maybe it's through search, maybe it's through referral traffic, maybe it's through direct type in traffic.

See the bigger picture.