Viral popularity doesn’t necessarily translate into commercial success
Published July 16th, 2007 in E-PRI was sorry to read that Funda Ireland shut its doors after only six months in operation. The property website was promoted through an excellent viral marketing campaign when it launched. Here’s the YouTube video which garnered a lot of online and media attention:
While the demise of the website can be put down to the future insecurity of the Irish property, its closure does make you pause for thought. There’s a lot of hype today around getting consumers talking about your brand. It’s worth noting though that sometimes talk doesn’t translate into money.
Technorati Tags: Funda, Piaras Kelly, Viral Marketing, YouTube
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I wouldn’t say that it was an excellent viral marketing campaign. Media Nerds like myself knew about the company but most people I’ve recently talked to (many of them househunters) didn’t know what Funda was. This included one person who e-mailed me the link to the above video when it first came out!!!
You’ve hit the nail on the head Sean. Just because you have a popular video out there, it might not necessarily be hitting your target audience. Pretty hard to compete with established sites like Daft or MyHome.ie or if one of your other main competitors is flinging money at advertising.
I guess 82k views isn’t really that big in the grand scheme of things. Interestingly enough YouTube now has stats for the Irish market, here is link to the most popular videos this month in Ireland http://ie.youtube.com/browse?s=mp&t=m&c=0&l= . As far as I know they calculate these based on user settings.
You can’t call it an “excellent” viral campaign if it didn’t work out for the company, Piaras!
It did work out for the company though, they raised awareness about Funda’s launch and got plenty of hits and articles about it. In terms of the KPIs they set for themselves I;d say they met all of them.
There is a big difference between a successful launch in terms of publicity and commercial objectives. There’s been a number of high profile launches over the last couple of years which garnered plenty of column inches, but didn’t necessarily translate into sales.
I’m sure one of the “the KPIs they set for themselves” was being in business for more than 6 months.
Yeah a bit of research might have shown them that. You’ll never find me saying though that an article in the paper is going to equal X amount of sales.