For the past two years, Office Max tried an experiment on viral marketing by allowing people to create little dancing elves with their favorite photos in there and watch the elf dance to jingle bells. Unless you have been hiding in a cave, you probably made an elf or 10 right?

Did you elf yourself? I elfed my daugher, Izzy last year… here is the photo:

So, I was sitting at Panera the other day and I read this full page ad they had placed in the USA Today, which shows you how a good viral buzz campaign can work for a company.

Now what is sad is this site got so much traffic over the holidays and now that Santa has packed up, he took his Elves with him and the site is no longer “elfing” people. Why not put an optin form there Office Max? You are wasting you traffic and not capturing the visitors… duh!

Here is what they said in the ad.

“we would like to publically apologize for the recent drop in global productivity. Again, it was all caused by the re-launch of our www.elfyourself.com site.

We had no idea that this year over 123 million elves would be created (more than the populations of Canada, France, Sweden and New York City combined) in just 8 weeks.

And we never imagined that people would choose to spend over 2600 combined years making them - that’s enough time to date back to the 6th centrury B.C. and the Neo-Babylonian Empire.

So basically, a whole lot of people chose to create a whole lot of frolicking elves in tights instead of working on a whole bunch of other stuff. (oops…our bad!)”

Wow, so let’s do the #’s there again…

8 weeks = 123 Million people participated for free. After each time someone created an elf, they could MAIL IT (tell a friend generator type deal) to anyone and invite them to make an elf. THEN, after all that was done, guess where you ended up… seeing what Office Max’s special offers were on their website.

Do you think they might have sold a thing or two to some of those 123 million people? How about a HUGE email database to market back to? Maybe…

But they don’t talk about how much they sold or how much they made off this viral campaign. So maybe it was not as hot as they liked or mum’s the word at corporate.

Regardless, how much would it cost you or a starving programer to outsource a project like this that is fun, happy, viral and also gets your brand name exposed in the process?

If you can figure out a great gimmick like Orbitz.com did with Bash the Boss, then, you could have a serious hit on your hands. By the way… did you know national bass the boss day is coming up soon? See my earlier press release for that…. National Bass the Boss Day.

Look how much time the world spent on making elves… 2600 combined years, which is staggaring.. What if we united under some other cause or charity and put 2600 combined years effort into that? Wouldn’t that have a huge effect on something?

Well, lessons learned. Discover if there is a way to create a game, a tell-a-friend generator so massive people tell massive people about you or your deal.. and you could be well on your way with a great viral buzz campaign that takes off like crazy like Elf Yourself did.

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