The Oatmeal at SXSW

While the majority of sessions that I'm attending here at SXSW are related to my work as a product manager, there were a couple sessions I wanted to attend for purely personal reasons. #1 on my list was Viral Marketing with the Oatmeal. Matthew Inman, aka The Oatmeal has been churning out hilarious, relevant and very relatable comics on his web site since 2009. His session at SXSW dealt with the history of his website as well as some of the tips and tricks he's used to expand his creative empire. Inman is hilarious in person and getting the back story on some of the comics and quizzes he's done was phenomenal. Here are the highlights:

-The name. "The Oatmeal" was a direct result of the first person shooter "Quake." When the game debuted, Inman was a huge fan of the multiplayer experience and his handle was "Quaker Oatmeal." He later shortened it to Oatmeal and that has been his go-to handle/screen name/avatar ever since.
-The quizzes. Ever done "How Many Hungry Weasels Could Your Body Feed?" or "Are Your Loved Ones Plotting to Eat You?" These, and the many other delightfully-named quizzes featured on the Oatmeal aren't just goofy diversions, they're actually a highly effective guerilla SEO technique. Inman's first solo venture was an online dating site which he eventually sold to a larger competitor. To drive search engine traffic to the site, Inman created quizzes like "How Many Five Year Olds Could You Take in a Fight?" On the results page of each quiz Inman placed a small link to his dating site at the bottom. As well as a snippet to embed the results page on Facebook, a blog, etc. The quizzes went viral and were enormously popular, so the link to the dating site spread like wildfire. By determining how long you would last in a zombie apocalypse and then sharing your score with your friends you were inadvertently boosting the the rank of Inman's dating site in search engine results. Pretty smart.
-PETA. A few years ago, PETA kicked off a campaign to try and convince the general public that fish were "sea kittens." Most people are opposed to eating kittens. So PETA figured that if people starting thinking of fish as cuddly, they wouldn't be so eager to catch and consume them. Inman immediately responded with his own site promoting the consumption of "Sea Bacon." PETA was not amused. Last year, Inman did a comic extolling the 5 Reasons Pigs Are More Awesome Than You (#1 reason - Pigs experience a 30 minute orgasm). PETA was so impressed with the comic (and apparently forgot about Sea Bacon), that they linked the comic on their website. When Inman saw the influx of traffic to the site from PETA's domain, he inserted some code to redirect hits from that domain to a new comic advocating the eating of horses. It took PETA 8 hours to catch the redirect and update their link.
-Bieber. Inman's friends have urged him for some time to do a comic skewering Justin Bieber. But after taking some time to research what exactly a Bieber was, Inman decided he was merely another reason to feel bad for humanity as a species and not worthy of a comic. He did create a quiz called "How Many Justin Biebers Could You Take In A Fight?" Recognizing that many quiz takers would post their results to twitter, Inman added Bieber's twitter tag to the automated Twitter export. So every time someone Tweets their Bieber bashing score, the Biebs himself gets a heads up.