Win Friends & Influence People Update

Posted in My Projects, Trivial on January 17th, 2006

Five days after launch, traffic to my summary of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People is starting to trickle down. While a few people charged me with teaching others how to be manipulative, most comments have been overwhelmingly positive.

As a viral marketing experiment…

Unfortunately, Awstats - my tracking platform - wasn’t set up properly and my reported 24,000 visits and 50,000 page views may be entirely inaccurate. Eager to gauge the success of my viral marketing experiment, I ran over to Alexa and was astonished by how well I was able to attract traffic!

At peak, I had a ranking of approximately 18,200! As I was checking out agencies to apply to in NYC, I found my rank, reach and page views for the past few days has surprised that of ad campaigns promoted on their respective homepages. While brief, my peak far exceeded that generated by well-funded, recent promotional work for sierramist.com, novartis.com, lenscrafters.com, Guinness, history.com and Aqua Fina! These are all easily multi-million dollar ad campaigns! I spent a few weeks and $20!

The best comparison I could find – graph below - was from CP+B – currently the hottest agency in the ad world right now. One year ago, they initiated a viral campaign initiative to drive traffic to comeclean.com. While brief, my $20 of funding gave me a peak that slightly surpassed their efforts. Based on almost no information, I would suspect that the creative development alone cost (Fee + out of pocket) a minimum of $200k, but I’d speculate the total effort consumed approximately $3MM+. The blue line represents my peak. Click the image to see a larger, more current graph at www.alexa.com.

I should also add that their measuring success far differently and navigating consumer perception and behavior constraints that wouldn’t apply to my little experiment. Still, both my site and CP+B’s are essentially gimmicks to drive “word-of-mouth” traffic.