By I was particularly impressed last week with the political quiz website ISideWith. If you haven’t yet taken it for a spin, I recommend doing so, not because it’s likely to change your political affiliation (we might even have a genetic predisposition there that no evidence will be strong enough to overrule), but because it’s an excellent case study in effective viral marketing.
In particular, ISideWith has two very impressive psychological triggers:
First, they make it easy to share on any platform with bright, customized, obvious buttons, but better yet, they’ll actually track the clicks and report back how many people took the quiz as a result of your sharing activity:
That number plays off the ego of influencers who will naturally want to prove to themselves how effective they are at driving action. Chalk up a huge win for ISideWith.
Secondly, and far more subtly, they ask for feedback on how your scores/preferences made you feel:
This reaction turns into a ready-to-share Facebook post. ISideWith uses your own, simplistic click of a radio button and transforms it into a slightly customized snippet that’s perfect for Facebook sharing. Playing on the psychology of a simplistic investment from a user to share their state of mind and making it a Facebook post is pretty genius. I suspect a lot of marketers can borrow from their example
None of this is to say that I don’t have lots of marketing, SEO, social, and viral feedback for the creators of the site. It’s certainly not perfect and it misses lots of opportunities in other areas. But these two, along with the general design and execution of the site are worth a look, and probably, imitation.
p.s. Politically-focused comments will be removed, so please don’t post them here.