McDonalds Uses Word of Mouth & Viral Email now

Here’s a great article from the Womma Blog on how McDonald’s - one of the world’s biggest advertisers is using word of mouth and viral email to promote their latest products.

Most home business operators aren’t savvy enough to emulate the viral email strategy, though it is interesting.

But many could use a viral video if it were funny and unique enough.

It helps that there are so many McDonalds restaurants to benefit. Ordinary mortals will have to put a web domain at the end of the video or in the video somehow as a placement.

What do you do to promote word of mouth advertising?

When tens of thousands of viewers watched and passed along a YouTube video depicting two Chicago-based improv comics doing a beatbox/rap about Chicken McNuggets, ad agency and WOMMA member company Arnold Worldwide prompted McDonald’s to pay attention. The genuine, organic, consumer-generated-video-turned-commercial recently ran on seven New York TV stations and helped generate enormous buzz and increase the sales of chicken nugget meals at the fast food chain. McDonald’s is also running a similarly-conceived commercial based on a YouTube submission that featured two teens singing their orders at a McDonald’s drive-through. The teens uploaded the original video to YouTube, where it generated 40,000 views and inspired the resulting commercial.

McDonald’s is currently working with Oddcast to create an avatar-based viral email campaign. At www.MySnackTime.com, users enter basic information about a friend or co-worker who they want to tell about the Chipotle BBQ snack wrap. This generates an email, which leads recipients to a personalized, snack-wrap-evangelizing avatar that knows just a little too much about them. According to Oddcast, people who receive emails from friends are 60-65% more likely to open them and are 30-35% more likely to pass the email along to yet another person, making this effort one that is full of viral potential.