What makes people rally around a site?

[TheIronStar]

I read this article in the news--

New Yorkers rally to help online Romeo - Internet - MSNBC.com

--and it made me curious about many things.

- What makes people actively help an unknown, somewhat strange, total stranger in such a fashion?

- How does one market a personal web site (getting the proverbial word out to all the right people in such a short time) so effectively?

- How does one rally people to put in such effort for one at all? I don't even see any mention of the people doing the searching and connecting being paid.

If anyone here knows how this was done and why it worked, I'd love to hear from you.

[Brutha]

- How does one market a personal web site (getting the proverbial word out to all the right people in such a short time) so effectively?

You are authentic and tell a story that people want to hear. The story is romantic and let's people transcend the moment.

It the same reason why people pay a few bucks to go to the cinema. The want to hear an engaging story that more authentic than their own boring day to day lives.

[TheIronStar]

Originally Posted by Brutha

You are authentic and tell a story that people want to hear. The story is romantic and let's people transcend the moment.

It the same reason why people pay a few bucks to go to the cinema. The want to hear an engaging story that more authentic than their own boring day to day lives.

Perhaps, but the chain of transmission of information regarding the site's existence had to have started somewhere and been actively marketed somehow. Somehow I doubt that it could have been purely the result of content; few people type in "men looking for women on crowded subways" into a search engine and surf the results in the course of everyday life.

To use your analogy, somehow all the right people had to have been informed that there was a new movie in a new theater on Xth Avenue and Yth Street in some deserted near-ghost city that's not necessarily directly connected to any other city. It's unlikely that that many people would have found such a theater on their own. (I know through experience; I've set up sites that were complete and total failures that as far as I can tell, nobody at all saw. News of what one is doing has to get out to enough of the right people or else obscurity will be total.)

[richie]

It's because of the same reason site like myspace are popular, it's Viral marketing with mouth to mouth publicity.

Originally Posted by TheIronStar

Perhaps, but the chain of transmission of information regarding the site's existence had to have started somewhere and been actively marketed somehow. Somehow I doubt that it could have been purely the result of content; few people type in "men looking for women on crowded subways" into a search engine and surf the results in the course of everyday life.

To use your analogy, somehow all the right people had to have been informed that there was a new movie in a new theater on Xth Avenue and Yth Street in some deserted near-ghost city that's not necessarily directly connected to any other city. It's unlikely that that many people would have found such a theater on their own. (I know through experience; I've set up sites that were complete and total failures that as far as I can tell, nobody at all saw. News of what one is doing has to get out to enough of the right people or else obscurity will be total.)

[TheIronStar]

Originally Posted by richie

It's because of the same reason site like myspace are popular, it's Viral marketing with mouth to mouth publicity.

Well, I was hoping to find paths to resources on how that is done, since so many people here have weblogs and personal web sites. Not everything on the web goes viral, and even among things that are viral, very little goes to all the right people at once like that. It's quite easy to make a myspace site and have no one of any real consequence ever hear of it. (I've done, not deliberately of course, exactly that with weblogs of my own.) Thus my suspicion that he had specifically done something special in particular in spreading the word and identifying the proper set of people to target; the general concept of what he did overall is far from new, as sites such as heyyouitsme or missedconnections had long ago attempted to do, so the content is not what created his success.

I was looking basically for learning how to duplicate the effects he had and apply them as a repeatable, generalizable technique. Is this sort of viral exposure creation something that one would read about in marketing literature or would be directly taught in web-design schools?

[Brutha]

Perhaps, but the chain of transmission of information regarding the site's existence had to have started somewhere and been actively marketed somehow.

Yes, he probably did a bit of marketing to "start the chain", but that what everybody does. It doesn't seperate the successful websites from the unsuccesful ones.

One can put an Ad on craiglist and a few people will listen. If the don't tell someone else that doesn't really help you. But if every fith person who reads the craiglist article tells ten other people you win.

[TheIronStar]

Originally Posted by Brutha

Yes, he probably did a bit of marketing to "start the chain", but that what everybody does. It doesn't seperate the successful websites from the unsuccesful ones.

One can put an Ad on craiglist and a few people will listen. If the don't tell someone else that doesn't really help you. But if every fith person who reads the craiglist article tells ten other people you win.

Right, and he needed it to get into the hands of people who not only knew the right people, but also were willing to help for free.

So if we cannot ascribe the effect to the content (as I mentioned, few people are actively seeking that sort of content) nor to the initial marketing effort, then what does get something not only to go viral, but to be transmitted very rapidly to all the right people (in his case, not just anyone, but specifically knowledgeable New Yorkers who, miracle of miracles, were actually willing to help him) in a manner described in your hypothetical Craigslist ad?

Which schools teach viral marketing? I'd like to learn about it in detail for my own purposes.

[Lauxa]

Well, if I were surfing craigslist and I saw a post like that, I would probably forward it to a few friends. If a friend sent it to me, I might forward it to a few more people.

I mean, this guy isn't asking you to send money, he's asking you to help him find a girl. And you're going to be drawn in and wonder if he can find her and it doesn't cost you anything to help him so why not?

So, yeah, I think it's the content.

[Brutha]

Originally Posted by TheIronStar

Right, and he needed it to get into the hands of people who not only knew the right people, but also were willing to help for free.

So if we cannot ascribe the effect to the content (as I mentioned, few people are actively seeking that sort of content)

Good content is not the same thing as content which is easily found. Have you ever tried to search for a site like myspace on google before you knew that myspace existed?

Which schools teach viral marketing? I'd like to learn about it in detail for my own purposes.

There are probably some MBA programs where you can take a class in viral marketing.
I would also recommend Seth Godins blog.