Should you hire streakers to promote your site?

I enjoy seeing the viral marketing techniques that other companies use. One that is hard not to notice is the online casino Golden Palace. Every month or two they show up in the news for something. Their website has 12+ videos of streakers at sporting events with "Golden Palace .com" written on themselves. They bought the infamous virgin mary grilled cheese sandwich among other things. Again and again they make the news. These publicity stunts are really part of an elaberate viral marketing scheme.

Should you be hiring streakers to promote your business? Probably not. If you are an online casino, however, it might not be a bad way to get the message straight to your audience. In an age of over-saturated marketing URLs on the backs of naked people at sporting events still do leave an impression.

Even more recently Golden Palace made the news buy buying tsunamirelief.com for $10,000 from an eBay auction. (Side note for domain speculators: next time their is a natural disaster expect every variation of [insert name of disaster] - [other word].com to be registered within minutes.

By pulling publicity stunts like these GP gets its name and URL in the news. In many respects this is a lot cheaper than them paying for a TV or newspaper ad; much less an ad in every one of them.

This viral marketing strategy is viable simply because of the target audience for online gambling sites. If you run a vinyl siding business streakers probably aren't going to bring you a whole lot of business.

These are some things to consider before initiating a viral marketing campaign. If you audience is large and general (as opposed to a small niche) then you might want to seriously consider a viral marketing campaign offline as well as online.

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