Send a viral Valentine

Send a viral Valentine

Chicago Tribune: This holiday season, 26.4 million people visited a Web site sponsored by OfficeMax that invited them to upload a photo of themselves, attach it to the body of a dancing elf and forward it to everyone in their e-mail address book. Toy New York, the ad agency behind elfyourself.com, said those people spent a cumulative 2,614 years elfing themselves.

If this is the first you’ve heard of it, we’ll save you a trip to the computer: The site is no longer there. You can bet it will be back, though, along with zillions of copycat sites trying to replicate OfficeMax’s viral success.

Viral marketing depends on what was known as word-of-mouth back in the days when face-mailing was known as talking. The idea is to get the message in front of someone who will post it, link to it or e-mail it to a network of people who will pass it on to their own networks so that it spreads, exponentially, like a bad germ. Everyone we know who got an elfyourself e-mail immediately dropped whatever they were doing and set to work uploading their own face, their kids’ faces, the boss’ face — in all, 123 million elves were made.

The best viral campaigns have a subversive feel about them, i.e. OfficeMax sabotaging worker productivity with an irresistible little time-waster best enjoyed at your desk. Does this help sell office supplies? Not our problem.

But what are we supposed to do with those hours now?

Valentine’s Day is just around the corner, and we’ve discovered iheart.despair.com, where you can create and e-mail a candy heart inscribed with your very own message. You get only two lines of six characters each, so it helps to be fluent in textspeak, but knock yourself out.

On your own time, of course.