Well I couldn't let the holiday season pass us by without writing a post about those clever little elves that Office Max has brought back again for their fourth Christmas. JibJab is also back on the team for the 2009 edition of ElfYourself, the extremely popular website that features dancing elves you customize with the faces of you and your friends. The site has become an Internet holiday tradition drawing millions of visitors each year.
ElfYourself started back in 2006 and was a surprising viral marketing hit with 36 million views in its first year. In 2007, it really took off and reached 193 million views which I reported in this post. Last year I wrote about it again here when Office Max teamed up with JibJab to power the site. However they experienced a significant drop in views only bringing in 55 million. Much of the dropoff was a result of requiring visitors to register in order to share their videos with their friends. So while the videos didn't go as viral as they had the previous year, it did give JibJab a larger userbase.
This year the registration requirement is gone and instead it has been integrated with Facebook Connect which has been helping ElfYourself go even more viral then ever as videos now are being easily distributed through Facebook News Feeds. Users are also given the option to tweet their videos, or post them on nearly a dozen other networks, including Bebo and Orkut. Users can also now follow the elves on this Twitter page.It looks basically the same as last year where visitors can create up to 5 elves and select from various dancing styles like hip-hop, dance and new this year is disco and country. They can now pay to have their elves printed on gift cards or greeting cards, or to download a version they can store locally.
What I've read online is that views have been up considerably from last year. So we'll have to get a report back after the season has passed. Well here's my video. Enjoy!
I did just receive an update regarding the IAMS Home 4 the Holidays campaign which I wrote this post about last week. I was informed that 808,147 pets had been adopted as of December 17th! They are definitely on our way to reaching their 1.5MM goal by January 4th (only 14 days left now)!
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