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I’ve been running the Human Census experiment for 17 days now, and wanted to give you an update. So far, on our brand new site, www.humancensus.com, we’ve had 939 site views, 131 comments, and 17 daily questions.

Not bad. But on the other hand, not particularly amazing, either.

It has been fun to ask questions & see the responses, and take a really casual, simple approach to running a project, especially in contrast with the somewhat overachieving projects I’ve done recently.

However, even though the project is a simple one, I am always looking for ways to make it more effective & to have a broader reach.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and researching on viral marketing. During the past year, I’ve had some really interesting experiences with internet marketing, and had both successful and unsuccessful campaigns.

When we first started the kiosk project back in December, we just plain got lucky. The word spread quickly about the Hundred Dollar Business, and four days after we launched the blog, we were on the front page of Digg.com and had 1,800 visits to the site that day.

Throughout the rest of the month, in between running the kiosk and trying to sell products like crazy, we kept up some marketing efforts, but for the most part, the attention we got was mainly a result of how unusual our approach to starting a business was.

But, not every project is terribly unusual, and even if it is an interesting project, drumming up PR can be trickier than planned. I think sometimes that “viral marketing”, or the idea that people are going to magically tell all of their friends about your product/service/business, and forward on the news, and talk about your project, etc., is a really misunderstood concept.

Many times I hear entrepreneurs say that they are going to simply use “viral marketing” techniques to get the word out about their product or service. But they don’t necessarily mention exactly what/how they will do that, mainly because they don’t quite know what specifics they need to do. I’ve done this myself, as well.

This situation can really end up harming an entrepreneur’s marketing reach, because they assume that the word will spread naturally, but don’t invest effort and therefore end up with little or no results.

And yet, sometimes you can set up all of the tools to promote something, and people just don’t show interest. So “viral marketing techniques”, while a huge blessing if you’re on a budget, ends up being an elusive frustration.

Why are masses of people prone to talk about Paris Hilton? Or those blender videos from BlendTech? The iPhone? Donald Trump vs. Rosie O’Donnell? Angelina Jolie? Harry Potter 5?

It seems like there is a body of popular knowledge, or stories that become popular (some small blender company in Utah– how does that become infamous?), but we’re not really ever sure why or how.

Viral marketing is alive and well, and if you really want or need to create a large audience for your business, why not study these kinds of examples to determine what they are doing right?

The Sum-Up

Anyway, unfortunately, I haven’t come up with any particular conclusions about what exactly viral marketing is or, how to accomplish it most effectively yet. But it’s on my mind all the time, so hopefully I’ll come up with something soon.

Here are some of the links to articles I’ve been reading to glean ideas.

MarketingSherpa’s Viral Marketing Hall of Fame 2006: Top 12 Campaigns You Should Swipe Ideas From

Is Viral Overexposed?

Tapping Into Code Hunting

SEOmoz | Anatomy of a Super Digg

The Six Simple Principles of Viral Marketing

Viral marketing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

What do you think about this strange phenomenon of “viral marketing”?