Is this Viral?

I've had two contacts recently with what may be described as ‘viral marketing.’

Continuing the discussion on viral marketing...
http://socialmedia.groups.vox.com/library/post/6a00cdf3a28cf0cb8f00d4141a52166a47.html

First up, there was a pleasant comment left by Eric from Shoutfit on an item that I posted earlier...
I find it interesting that one ‘social network’ site has a presence on another.

I cross-posted this Shoutfit item over at 360, and got a bit more feedback. Here are the comments...

Siri
Where is the individuality?
How boring is this!??
Wednesday February 14, 2007 - 11:56am

hotcl…
It was like paper dolls on the computer. Hey that'd be fun if we could alter the images and re-dress the folks on there?
Wednesday February 14, 2007 - 11:58am

~Gypsy~
Wow... I never knew...
Wednesday February 14, 2007 - 01:57pm

Sean
I like Hotclaw's idea.
Also, I am very disturbed that a majority of people seem to find being fashionable requires one to be headless. Is this really the price we want to pay to look good? Even if it is really, really, really good-looking?
That was my Zoolander impersonation by the way. Blue steel!
Wednesday February 14, 2007 - 06:03pm

Adrii06
"I want to be different… So I dress the same as all these other people"
Monday February 19, 2007 - 10:03pm

A broad spread of opinion, and I'm pretty sure that Shoutfit and the other sites listed probably got more then a couple of hits.

Speaking of which, have you guys seen this search engine...
http://www.like.com

If I were these ‘social network’ sites I’d be following Vox and going mobile.
Girls + Mobile phone + fashion blogging = Wow

Imagine the traffic generated if people could take a photo of clothing they liked on someone walking past.
Upload it to a ‘social networking’ site where friends would comment.
Then a search engine seeks out the best price for this item.

The second example of the subtlety that I feel is the mark of successful ‘viral campaign’ is an invitation to be 'a friend' I received on YouTube.

I pretty certain that this invitation was in response to someone seeing the videos posted on my YouTube channel, of a holiday that I took last year on a dolphin research vessel.
After receiving this invitation I followed the link back to a web site run by a whale research program here in Oz (called iWhales, cute!)

These people were looking for volunteers and must have searched out 'Dolphin' tags amongst the YouTube videos and sent out invitations.
Nice work. No pressure to look at the site or buy anything. They must be relying on people’s curiosity to draw eyeballs to their site.
It worked, cause I sent off the cheque to book a place for later in the year.

This could potentially backfire on them as if I have a bad time, I might post uncomplimentary things in my blog :-)
But they will have made a sale.