Dead Baby Causes Stir Online

May 14, 2009 - PRLog -- While the thought of a dead baby is something that would seem abhorrent to even the most staunch of people, it is something being used to good effect on the Internet by many individuals and companies.

So-called ‘Dead Baby’ marketing, a term coined by web promotion and traffic company uSocial.net, is a promotional tactic which relies on business and individuals using shock tactics as promotion tools in order to draw attention to themselves.

“These days it’s easy to get lost in the mass of news and media online, meaning you have to do something quite different in order to get noticed,” says uSocial.net CEO Leon Hill. “Dead Baby Marketing is a term we’ve created which we believe perfectly describes the overall theme of this tactic.”

According to uSocial, the basis of Dead Baby Marketing is creating a media or viral buzz in the form of a press event, article or similar content relating to a business. This in turn results in many people spreading the information around and talking to others about it, spreading it further than the company could do on their own.

And when it comes to shock marketing, uSocial have already caused a great deal of commotion online, being the first company to publicly and unashamedly admit to selling votes on social bookmarking sites including Digg, Yahoo! Buzz and Propeller.

“When we launched in December of 2008, we drove as much attention as we could to the fact we were selling social media votes, which is something that nobody else had promoted before,” says Hill. “Because a lot of people hated what we were doing it meant they talked about it in countless forums online, spreading the word about our venture like wildfire.”

Hill famously received a Cease & Desist order from Digg’s lawyers less than a week after launching his business, however no further legal action was taken and as such, uSocial continue to sell social media votes.