Diggin' it

Posts like this one we've been passing around about the power of Digg are good advocates for the power of social media sites to generate enormous amounts of traffic, visibility and revenue.

[Cameron Olthius] was hired by LifeInsure.com to tackle what many would see as an impossible project: sparking a viral marketing campaign around the topic of life insurance. He created a page on LifeInsure's site listing "19 Things You Probably Don't Know About Death," and posted it to Digg. The list—which enumerated "facts" like a person's ability to remain conscious 15 seconds after decapitation—was a hit with Digg's users, who voted for the page 1,332 times. Those positive votes, or "diggs," pushed the list to the top of Digg's home page and drew tens of thousands of visitors to LifeInsure.

I'm interested in how venues like this are useful for firms with specialized niche B2B products. I mean, what if we siezed on a genius idea and got thousands visitors to our site?

We'd get an improved Google ranking — and the attention of a lot of people who couldn't care less about commercial surveillance video technologies.

I remember a really interesting story in the Wall Street Journal several years ago, about a company that decided to begin giving its $9000 bread-and-butter industrial-grade technical product away for free. They were among the first wave of firms recognizing the power of service contracts over equipment sales, and made a bold move to adapt their business model to a new paradigm. The fact that I got value out of the story and still remember it doesn't make me a customer for their product. Whatever it was.

— posted by Abigail Hamilton

Comments

[rc helicopter reviews]

Impressive blog! -Arron

[Peter]

I found this story about the power of digg and social media: http://www.digg.com/tech_news/Digg_This_Headline_For_Google_s_Sake_Congoo