I had the pleasure of listening to theDuct Tape Marketing Podcast recently, the March 23 episode featureing David Meerman Scott, who recently wrote the book called World Wide Rave.  David makes some really interesting points about how trends get started on the Internet.  He provides numerous case studies on viral videos and blog posts, and how people have used these to build their businesses. 

Examples included Blendtec, a maker of heavy-duty blenders who increased sales tenfold after creating some wacky videos and the site Will it Blend?, showing their blenders chop non-food items.  He also talks about  Helaine Smith, DMD, a Boston Dentist who quintupled her business after publishing a free e-book called "Healthy Mouth, Healthy Sex." 

My daughter Patti is in London, England for three weeks as part of the USC Law program, and we are keeping her daugther Eva.  We have been having nightly Skype sessions where she tells us about her day and she is even able to read bedtime stories to Eva.   It is amazing and it is free. 

My father-in-law, Jerry Maslar, is  working hard to promote traffic to his trout fishing site, www.troutu.com.  As you can see from the chart above, he is doing quite a good job.  In the last week or two, we started talking about "going viral", the idea that we produce something on the site that people want to forward to all their friends, which of course would drive tremendous traffic to our site.

"That's sounds great," he said, "how do we get started creating a viral video?"   Well, I thought, one of you guys could do a belly flop off a water fall, or you could slice open the fish and eat it's guts out... generally something really stupid or really gross would have the best chance of spreading... Of course it doesn't have to be stupid or gross, it could be someone singing real well, like that Susan Boyle on Britain's Got Talent,  which has had 50 million views in two weeks.

The January 14 episode (click to download) of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast had an excellent interview with Seth Godin, talking about the opportunities for small businesses and individuals in the current economic climate.   As usual, Seth motivated me, and as a result, I am blogging again.