The Art of Collective Curation - More Viral Loops

[Stuart Cosgrove]

The Financial Times maxes out on viral-loop media, under the title Famous for 15 Megabytes.

In an extract from Adam Penneberg's book on viral user-generated content, the FT, describes how viral clips have been co-opeted by marketing. The example used is the now famous 'Mentos in Diet Coke' fad.

"On the first Saturday in June they posted the experiment to their website. Voltz told one person about it: his brother. Within hours, thousands of visitors were viewing “Experiment #137”. By the end of the first day, they counted 14,000 downloads. Two days later, The Late Show with David Letterman called. Grobe told producers they had only done the fountain once and would need a chance to rehearse. Over the next few weeks, Grobe and Voltz grew confident they could perform the Mentos geyser live. Meanwhile, the video became a runaway hit. Over nine days, more than 2m people logged on to their site. "

...Michael Donnelly, the company’s interactive director, admitted that Coke wasn’t prepared for this. But in July 2006 the soft- drink maker relaunched Coke.com with a new focus: consumer-generated media that celebrates creativity and self-expression. Within days of starting his job at Coke, Donnelly contacted Voltz and Grobe. This led to a meeting between Coke, Mentos, Grobe, Voltz and Google, which also wanted in on the action."

Any great viral videos campaigns you are currently following add to this blog please?