Thanks to a 16-year old girl, a small e-commerce site had its best day ever, as they detail in a blog post.
No, not because of a mad spending spree with dad's credit card, but a viral video.
A 16-year old video blogger called Blair Flower, a.k.a. Juicystar07, put a video on YouTube extolling Shoes of Prey, a site that lets women design their own custom shoes online and then order them. She encouraged her viewers to create their own design on the site, post it as a comment to the video, and win free shoes. The video then became one of the top viewed on YouTube, with over 450,000 views, which drove over 200,000 visits in one day to the small e-commerce site.
The video was a promo -- the site's manager had contacted Blair and sent her a free pair of shoes -- but it worked beyond the site's expectations.
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However, very few of those visits converted into actual sales, because most of Blair's viewers are "primarily 13-17 year old girls" (presumably without access to their parents' credit cards). Nevertheless, the owners of Shoes of Prey are very excited by this.
This shows how awesome and/or challenging social media can be for small businesses. On the one hand, it gives anyone a shot at worldwide, massive exposure. On the other hand, how to do it is sometimes mysterious, and even when it happens, it doesn't necessarily convert to actual increased sales.
Still a very interesting story.
Check out the details on the blog post, or watch the video here (if you like 16-year old girls talking about shoes):
