If you have an account on Facebook you must have noticed the trend of « Post your Bra Color on Facebook for Breast Cancer Month » that popped up earlier this year. For the people who haven’t, random Facebook users were asking around and trying to identify why girls (and boys awkwardly) were posting a random color as their Status Update every day. We later found out that this was indeed the color of their bra that they were wearing. This campaign generated millions of Facebook Status Updates and have helped raise awareness for the Breast Cancer Month that was last October. Now this was mainly for a cause, a foundation, to help raise awareness.

Surprisingly, however, it doesn’t end there. Urban Dictionary is the recent victim of the Facebook Status Update craze and is probably loving the success so far ! Here is my theory on how this exploded into a massive viral campaign on Facebook for UrbanDictionary.com :

What’s Happening

Go to urbandictionary.com, type in your first name, copy and paste this as your Facebook status, and put the first entry for your name under comments.

This is what people are posting as their status update and then in as a comment to that update. Hundreds of thousands of people have already done it and more are joining the craze every second.

How It Happened

Think about it this way. Everyone likes to read their daily horoscope or at least take a peek at it once in a while, why? Because they like to know a little something about themselves that they can identify too or identify a friend with. This is exactly how Urban Dictionary approached it for their 10 Year Celebration. They took their site’s most popular feature; the user submitted name terms and brought it on to Facebook for everyone to share with their friends. They approached the power of human gossip for their very own viral marketing campaign and added a jetpack to it.

The result … it works !

Personalized Results + Friend Connections

Everyone knows something on their friends that can be very pleasant or unpleasant to hear. How you share it to your friends is your call but think about it this way. You now have the opportunity to tell everyone what the world thinks about you. Would you do it ? I would definitely search and see if it’s funny or at the very least not degrading. Who wouldn’t want to enter their name in a search engine and see what kind of results come out of it ? People do it already on Google in hopes on finding something about themselves that they didn’t know about. It’s fun and gives you a sort of reality check.

Well Urban Dictionary lets you do just that, even though most times it’s completely irrelevant to you personally, it still gives you a few laughs when the results pop up in their dictionary.  I laughed, and when I posted it on Facebook I received about 15 comments just from friends that were relating too it somehow. Within seconds later, I’d see a dozen of my friends doing the same exact thing. It’s just brilliant, spreads easily and it just simply works.

The Impact

Hundreds and thousands of users rushed to UrbanDictionary.com to find out what it said about their first name. It resulted in hundreds of Facebook Updates and Tweets every second linking or mentioning Urban Dictionary from all over North America and England. Here is their Alexa ranking from the beginning of January too February 1st:

I can’t even imagine when Alexa will update their rankings for next week, it will be off the roof. This is by far the most successful use of Facebook Status Updates I have seen so far in a Viral Marketing approach. All this is mostly thanks to how Urban Dictionary has evolved over the years as a brand and their 4,609,582 user submissions thus far.

Give It A Try

You should give it a try. Here’s mine for a good laugh. (don’t mind the syntax errors, I didn’t write this and copy/pasted the result directly from this page)

A big buff guy who has the emotional equivalent to a rock. He is usualy hot, but doesn’t quite understand that girls like PDA. Highly intelligent, but doesn’t understand common relationship protocol. He doesn’t mean to be jerk, but can occasionally come off as one.

Try it out for yourself and let us know your result in the comments if you have the guts.