I’ve written before my thoughts that viral marketing isn’t new, and today I was sent a link to a fantastic example of what viral marketing is all about. It’s called SomethingStore and the basic premise is this: pay $10 and receive a totally random something in the mail 5 to 10 days later.
 
What you get is completely random and may or may not be of value to you. However, looking through the list of sent products, it seems most of the things are at least fun. You can see examples of random somethings on their site.
 
The reason I really wanted to point this out was to draw a correlation to my previous post about viral. Both word of mouth and viral marketing depend very greatly on one thing: value. Your business/site has to have something of value if it’s going to get anyone else talking/blogging about it. You can hire whatever agency you want, but at the end of the day, if you’re not offering something of value, you’re not going to succeed. At least not honestly.