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Viral Marketing: Our Snowman Game
How we made it to number 2 on the Lycos viral chart and had over 4,500 people taking part...
For 2006 we decided to create an online Christmas card rather than a printed card, comprising of a fun game and Christmas message. The game was aptly named "Snowman Game" and was a twist on the classic Nokia game, Snake. The initial incentive was to beat our top score of 782 and post their scores in the space provided. The Christmas card was added to our blog and can still be viewed in our blog archive.
As an experiment we decided to promote the game with a viral marketing campaign. We must stress that we are not experts in viral marketing and so wanted to see how far we could take the game with our limited knowledge.
Viral marketing is the spread of a product, game, service (and so on) via social networking and the Internet. The Internet has made viral marketing an extremely popular form of advertising and marketing with a rapidly growing global market. E-mail is the most commonly used tool in viral marketing to spread the message around. For more information on viral marketing visit the article on Wikipedia.
The Game
The game we chose to develop was based on the extremely popular Nokia mobile phone game, Snake. The snake was replaced with a snowman and the simplicity of the game was kept intact. Anyone who has ever owned or used a Nokia mobile phone will be very familiar with this game. The game itself is one of those games which is hard to put down and so was an ideal test for our viral marketing campaign.
The game was added to our blog and so instantly benefited from an RSS feed and send to a friend feature, all of which add to the stickiness of the game in the hope that visitors would spread the game and come back to play again.
The Viral Campaign
After a week of developing and perfecting the game we launched on the 6th November 2006. The next step was to start off the viral campaign by sending the game to various online viral directory and community websites.
This involved crawling the Internet for appropriate websites and sending e-mails or completing online forms to try and get the game listed. To monitor the success of the campaign we needed to know the number of visits the page received and the number of times the game was played. We could easily monitor the page views using website statistics, but the game plays was trickier. We opted for an e-mail alert system whereby an e-mail would be sent to us when the game was played. This e-mail allowed us to identify the number of repeat plays from a single person.
It took just one day for the game to be listed on the Lycos viral chart and then a further day before it sat at number two for three days (see screenshot below). For several weeks it was still in the top 10 and finally left the chart after the Christmas period.
Screenshot of the Lycos viral chart on 09/11/2006.
After being listed on the Lycos chart the game was subsequently picked up by a number of smaller viral websites, including fridayemails.co.uk.
The Response
After the third day we had just under 700 game plays and between 6th November and 20th December 2006 we achieved 4,289 plays. This is far more than we'd anticipated with limited knowledge of viral marketing.
The screenshot below shows the number of visitors we had to our website. At the height of the campaign we had 401 unique visitors a day.
Website statistics showing the number of visitors.
The initial incentive of trying to beat our top score had changed to a free prize to the winner. From the outset we wanted people to post their top scores in the comments. This was not really happening (just 2 scores posted) so we decided to offer a prize to the winner; an electronic Sudoku game worth £30 to the person with the highest score. This worked well and immediately we had over a dozen people posting their scores. In total, 27 scores were posted and the winner was announced on 20th December 2006. View the related news story announcing the winner.
Summary
In summary, it appeared to be relatively easy to be listed on some of the hundreds of viral websites and charts on the Internet, including one of the largest; Lycos. We experienced an initial boost in plays which dropped as the game fell in the chart. In principle, the game itself was relatively basic and with a bit more time and knowledge it would have been possible to promote the game further and achieve even more game plays...