Power of a Killer Buzz

Recently I’ve been reading about the highly successful 1999 launch of Half.com. Half.com is a website which sells books, movies, music and video games. Out of all the companies I could be reading about, why am I focusing on Half.com?

Going back to the heights of the dotcom boom when billions of advertising dollars were thrown down the drain, Half.com took a completely different approach. It was an approach so novel and it worked so well that they ended up being purchased from Ebay for nearly $300 million dollars six months following the launch of the business.

Let me repeat that again incase what I just said did not impress you. Six months following their launch, this startup company was purchased for $300 Million Dollars.

What did Half.com do that was so special which allowed them to become one of the biggest online portals in the word at a time when it seemed every Venture Capitalist was pouring an unheard of amount of money into mainstream television advertising?

As the story goes, a few months before launch time Half.com had hired a firm to help them come up with some fresh new ideas. The CEO knew he could not outspend his competitors in the mainstream media, so whatever it was going to be the publicity had to be organic.

One of the firm’s better ideas was to host a huge yard sell in Manhattan. This did not go over very well with Half.com team but it did trigger a brainstorming session that lead to several more ideas, such as getting rid of the firm right away.

After throwing out some rather crafty ideas such as flying a balloon over George Washington’s head at Mount Rushmore, one marketing genius came up with the idea to rename a town’s name that had the word “half” in it to Half.com

To make a great story on organic buzz marketing short, after six weeks of negotiations with a small town in Oregon called Halfway, they managed to strike a deal with them. For roughly $100,000, some new computers for the elementary school and a professional redesign of the towns’ website, the town would officially call itself Half.com for one year.

Now mind you, Half.com was not a live functioning website because it had not launched yet. They had also spent very little money promoting themselves. But when the news got wind that a small sleepy town of a less than a four hundred people decided to change their name from Halfway to Half.com, the media absolutely went wild.

The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and NBS’s Today Show all ran with the story creating a massive amount of publicity for Half.com. Time Magazine reported it was one of the greatest publicity coups in history.

I hear stories like this and wonder how to apply it to the things I am working on. Since it has already been done, I don’t think renaming a town would have the same explosive interest. It is really nice to see you do not need to outspend your competitor with endlessly deep pockets in order join them as a top dog.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 25th, 2007 at 2:41 pm and is filed under SEO / Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.