Jeff Goldsmith over at Care2 has written up his experience promoting a side project on MySpace and offers some quite useful pointers. Adventures of a Dead Elephant on MySpace talks about an attempt to get viral takeoff for some downloadable graphics making fun of Republicans. To get things started, Jeff and his colleagues spent $300 on Blogads and Google keyword ads, emailed a list of about 3300 people and tried posting on social news sites (Digg, etc.). They relied on word-of-mouse for further spread. He has good observations about the kinds of campaigns and content that are likely to succeed on social networking sites and also talks about specific techniques that can help with viral distribution. Fun stuff!
– cpd