USA Today: Net sensations are screen gems

Jedi litigant

The "dancing baby" and the "hamster dance" have circulated our online world at warp speed since '97 and '98 respectively. We marketers, rubbing our evil hands together, call them examples of "viral marketing," wishing we'd been smart enough to stick our own brand names on them in the beginning. USA Today asked the question how do they get started? After some snooping around, it found that the Hamster Dance was created by Autodesk as a demo of its CAD software. Hamster Dance stemmed from a contest between two sisters. They wanted to see which one could get more traffic. Little did they know that tens of millions of netizens would laugh and smile at the little digitized fur balls.

Up2Speed has already covered the chubby 15 year old Canadian boy who inadvertently left his video project behind in class, leading - lawsuit notwithstanding - to his light saber dance performance appearing so prevalently on the web that it hit number 39 on Lycos's top 50 meter.

So how do these net phenomena happen? Is this viral marketing at its finest or a kick in the face to us media folk? All companies want low-cost ways to build buzz, spawn brand awareness, create a leadership position and drive return on investment. Readers can click on the "viral marketing and buzz" category link on the right-hand column of this page to see countless examples of deliberate commercial efforts. So far, the accidental authors of this content haven't really realized the potential. And, on the other side, self-conscious advertisers haven't often proved their ability to manufacture the critical mass of creativity that can cause a self-sustaining reaction.