10 years of Viral Marketing success!

It's now ten years since Underground Creative Directors Sean Wilson and James Black began their pioneering Viral Marketing work, as James explains...

It started back in 1998 when myself and Sean were working as Creative Director and Technical Director of a large Manchester web agency.

We created a couple of Flash games and animations as a hobby, and sent the results of our efforts out to a few of our friends.

It was only intended to be a bit of fun, so we were extremely surprised when we found that the pages were getting thousands of visitors from all over the world.

We approached our boss with the suggestion that he could use this as a way of driving traffic to his clients' sites, but he wasn't interested, and told us to get back on with some "proper work"!

With his words still ringing in our ears, we decided to set up our own business.

As it turned out, our company was one of the very first in the world to specialise in Viral Marketing.

Within 12 months we had been commissioned to produce games and animations for the likes of the BBC, Channel Four, Channel Five and Blackthorn Cider.

We were even asked to create an online movie trailer for a large Hollywood film.

Our biggest success came during the 2002 World Cup when one viral animation was viewed by over a million people within 24 hours of being emailed out to about 100 people in our address book.

Over the last decade the world of Viral Marketing has changed beyond all recognition.

The fashion for sending attachments by email has died down as spam filters get ever more fussy.

But there is still no shortage of people wanting to send interesting and amusing web links and applications to their friends.

Social Networking sites such as Facebook, Myspace and Bebo have opened up a whole new market for viral applications, and the iPhone takes this into a mobile dimension.

As an example, our Facebook Penalty Shootout Game (pictured) reached over 100,000 registered users in a matter of months after launching earlier this year.

So if you're looking for a company to discuss how your business could benefit from Viral Marketing, get in touch.

After all, there aren't many other businesses in the world with a decade's experience in the industry.

Mod Rewite Generator - create permalinks easily

Creating 'Permalinks' for your site content is a great way to help improve your search engine rankings.

A URL like "search_engine_optimisation.html" is much better than one like "page.php?id=87698".

Blogs (like this) have been using permalinks for ages, and now more and more sites are realising that their PHP-generated page links need replacing with something neater.

Using PHP and a .htaccess file, the Mod Rewrite function makes it (fairly!) easy for a clued-up programmer to convert ugly URLs into much more SEO-friendly HTML links.

However, creating the actual .htaccess file can often be quite a laborious process with plenty of testing needed to make sure it generates the right results.

Fortunately, we've found a website that makes it much easier.

This neat Mod Rewrite Generator allows you to enter the URL you want to convert, and then have your .htaccess code created dynamically for you.

It cuts out probably the trickiest bit of implementing permalinks and is now one of the top pages in my bookmark list!

Nationwide media coverage at FeelCreative!

It's been a busy week at FeelCreative's gallery in Didsbury, with the national media descending on this normally quiet corner of Manchester for live TV broadcasts, radio interviews and news reports.

Last week saw the gallery launch an exclusive exhibition by Anne Kirkbride, better known as Deirdre Barlow from Coronation Street.

The exhibition immediately attracted the attention of the local papers, with the Manchester Evening News devoting half of it's front page to a picture of Anne, and a full page write-up inside.

But that was nothing compared with the 24 hours that followed.

The gallery had to open at 5.30am on Wednesday to allow the GMTV cameras inside to do an exclusive live feature.

This culminated with an interview with Anne on ITV, broadcast live from the gallery at 8.30am.

Literally seconds before that went on air, she had also found time to do a live radio interview with BBC Radio Manchester.

And later that day, Granada Reports arrived to film a news piece.

If that wasn't enough, the national media were now featuring the story, with The Sun, The Daily Mail and The Telegraph all devoting large articles to the exhibition.

It's been an amazing week of non-stop publicity, with the exhibition attracting far more attention than even we ever thought it would.

We've had customers driving from far and wide to see Anne's work, and the stream of visitors hasn't died down yet.

It just goes to show what a popular and much loved figure Anne - and Deirdre - is.

Make the World Happy!

UndergroundCreative's latest project, www.MakeTheWorldHappy.org, is a unique online experiment which aims to gather interesting data about levels of happiness around the world.

In recent months we've all seen news stories and statistics about stock markets crashing, currencies fluctuating and house prices dropping.

But with your help we want to uncover a much more interesting and useful set of statistics - how does happiness around the world vary day by day, month by month and year by year?

Are people in one country more happy than another?

Are people of a particular gender or age range happier or unhappier than the rest of us?

And what factors influence people's happiness? Money? Relationships? The weather???

These are the things we'd love to find out, but we can only do it with your help.

We need as many people as possible around the world to tell us how happy they're feeling. All it takes is one quick click on our website.

If we can get enough people to make the data meaningful, we should be able to start to examine the kind of issues mentioned above.

Our long-term aim is that we can use the data to find ways to improve levels of happiness for everyone around the world.

That might be a fanciful idea but it's a nice thought, and we'll never know unless we try!

On a more personal level, the site can also help you keep track of your own individual happiness.

You can see how your happiness levels compare with the rest of the world, and the other people in your country.

Soon, you'll also be able to see all kinds of other stats - how does your happiness compare to other people of your age? Are people born on a certain day, or a certain month, more happy?

So please, visit www.MakeTheWorldHappy.org and click one of the icons on the front page today to tell us how happy you are.

And tell your friends to do the same. If they tell their friends, and their friends tell even more people... before long we could have some very interesting things to tell everyone.