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Story URL: http://networks.silicon.com/webwatch/0,39024667,39165724,00.htm

Lenovo taps into viral web-marketing
Faking it...

By Gemma Simpson

Published: Thursday 08 February 2007

Lenovo has totted up around four million hits on a viral video site - and said it would consider using viral marketing again.

The PC maker launched a series of viral videos on a website called The Lenovo Tapes last year.

The site claimed to have obtained three videos smuggled from Lenovo's labs of some soon-to-be-released laptops with inventive attributes - including one with mini-jet engines which deployed in the event of it being dropped, to save it from hitting the ground.

Mike Etherington, marketing manager at Lenovo, said: "We weren't bothered about people noticing the videos are fakes, we just wanted to get the discussion and interest in Lenovo going."

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The Lenovo Tapes site was subsequently discussed in 2,248 blogs in 165 countries and received nearly four million hits, with an extra one million views estimated from sites such as YouTube hosting the viral videos.

Etherington told silicon.com that following the success of this campaign, the company would consider using viral marketing in the future.

More and more businesses are tapping into web 2.0 as a marketing tool. Last month an online currency exchange offered $10,000 to budding film-makers to create a short advert for the company and post it on the YouTube website.