Just as Obama's internet-savvy campaign helped organize younger voters, social media underpins the political current. The YouTube sensation of Iraqi journalist Muntadar al-Zaidi paying the ultimate disrespect to Bush during his final presidential visit to Iraq has made its way into Letterman's comedy, and is now real estate for contextual ads by Coke, not to mention Zappos.
Zappos corporate blogs say nothing about their viral and primetime PR, although a couple of Twitter posts acknowledge the social media effect. If this publicity helps ease the blunt of the recession upon the top shoe e-tailer, maybe it can rehire the 8% recently laid off. Zappos' December site statistics will be interesting to see once posted.
Google search results for the sole word "shoe" have the famous YouTube video sharing first page organic results with Zappos.com. Even a shoe-lovers website has jumped on the viral bandwagon, featuring al-Zaidi in a main page editorial complemented with an explanation of Arabic shoe etiquette. What could have left a bad taste in the mouths of shoe retailers became a godsend in internet eyeballs. At over 10 million views and growing, viral flash games and websites are still circulating around the world wide web.
Demonstrating once again how viral video can be a gold mine of clicks for the right company.
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