With the glut of online marketers and the holiday season gearing up, many businesses are having a hard time getting your attention. Enter the world of the weird, the wacky, and the downright crazy to make you go "Hmmm..."

Have you seen the "Mentos Intern"? You can order lunch, chat, watch a live feed while he works, schedule his work day, rate his efforts, and much, much more. The campaign is hilarious, and effective. The "Mentos Intern" grabs our attention simply because we can all relate to his predicament. Who hasn't been a lackey, working for 'The Man' at some point in their life? The campaign also includes the best of the best for social media marketing; Trevor is accessible through Myspace, Facebook, Blogs, and gaming! He's your friend, he's your buddy...he's the "Mentos Intern." The best part about this site is, that it's gone viral all across the web, and the "Mentos" name is tagging right along. What better way to promote your company (and your brand) than to take advantage of the net?

Here's another one that has been sweeping across the web. Sling Media is a company that designs and markets technology to control (and access) your basic cable from anywhere. Their home page features an interactive salesperson with a catch. Sling Media knows that salespeople are annoying--and exploits them. Their home page has an interactive Flash-based site that gives you the opportunity to be as mean as you could possibly be to "The Sling Man."

While you may not know what SlingMedia does, this viral campaign drives traffic to their site because it piques your curiosity and is pretty darn funny. This is a good example of how wacky viral marketing can get attention to an unknown brand; beneath the "Sling Man" are some brand-and-product links that will help you understand what their flagship product, the Slingbox, is all about.

What kinds of wacky viral marketing campaigns have you seen on the web? Does it work for you?

Success on YouTube is as much about effectively tapping the social network as it is about the content. Brand-building viral videos such as the ones I blogged about recently only happen if the conditions are right.

If you don't follow MarketingProfs, you may not have seen that my article "How to Market on YouTube" came out this week. For the article I had interviewed the marketing director at Blendtec about their famous "Will It Blend?" videos. "Will It Blend?" is one of my favorite examples of viral marketing on YouTube. It didn't take a big budget and an ad agency to dream it up, but boy did it work wonders for their brand!

So what are the secret ingredients to going viral on YouTube? I guess you'll have to read my article to find out! ;-)

It can be really hard to compete for eyeballs in YouTube with so many videos being posted every day. Some marketers manage to stand out in the crowd with their videos. Here are a few I think are worth mentioning...

• Will it Blend? by Blendtec -- Tom Dixon, founder of Blendtec, made a whole series of videos of himself blending all sorts of crazy things in his rugged and seemingly indestructible blenders, including marbles, iPods and rake handles.
• Sue Teller by Mountain Dew. Here is an elderly lady who is really down with the haps sharing her streetwise tips for young people. It is a real hoot.
• TaxRap contest by Intuit's TurboTax division -- They recruited rapper Vanilla Ice to kick off their video contest where you can rap about taxes and maybe win $25,000. Nice integration of celebrity endorsement (which incidentally, Intuit got for a very reasonable price), consumer generated content, and a contest with a highly motivating prize.
• Mr Cupid by Ice.com. Ice.com founder Pinny Gniwisch made his first foray into YouTube marketing as "Mr. Cupid" -- his code name on the streets of Manhattan, on the slopes in Utah, and places in between, where he asks passers-by questions about Valentines Day. Some of these clips are quite humorous and Pinny shows his stuff as being a very talented interviewer.
• Zeros by NBC. This is a spoof on the popular TV show Heroes. Very funny. It isn't immediately obvious that NBC is behind it, but it's a bit too professional to have been done by an amateur. So when it was revealed that NBC was behind it, it wasn't a big surprise.
• Tea Partay by Smirnoff -- This one is done as a music video and is really hysterical.

Have you considered incorporating content partners and marketing partners into your online strategy? For example, partnering with content providers who could augment your own content with additional related content? Or partering with sites whose visitors match your target market?  If, for example, you wanted to reach women online, you could partner with a site like iVillage.com and build a microsite together, then have them promote it through their site and subscription lists.

Think about the sites you advertise on as potential partners. Join forces and create a microsite together and then promote it to a joint captive audience. Or make a deal with them and syndicate some useful content onto their site. For example, you could develop a whole library of useful tips and, rather than doing standard banner ads, you could provide these tips to your partner, who would then fold it with the rest of their content. Et voila!... "Sponsored content"!

Even better if, between the two of you, you can develop some sort of "hook" or viral component, such as a funny video, an addictive game, a downloadable ebook, worksheet, calculator, widget, etc. 

Got an example to share of a site where the whole is greater than the sum of the partners? Post a comment!

Microsites can be really good at going "viral" if they are clever and have "pass it on" appeal. Subservient Chicken, Burger King's microsite was such a site. It featured a person dressed up in a chicken suit wearing lingerie. You could give it commands by typing them into a box. Pretty weird. Not surprisingly, it became quite popular and went viral.

You improve the chances that your campaign will go viral if it's a microsite because then it's at an arm's length from your corporate/brand site. Corporate sites rarely go viral. Subservient Chicken, for instance, surely had more "pass it on appeal" as a separate site than as a subdirectory within the BurgerKing.com site.

Emerald Nuts launched a funny microsite called AngryLeprechaun.com, which they tied in with their very expensive Super Bowl commercial and promoted through press releases. The site was a spoof; supposedly a leprechaun was supposed to be in the television commercial and was edited out in the final cut. Consequently, the leprechaun was very angry about it so he set up his own website. Visitors can watch the 'unedited' video clips with him in the commercial. Cute idea.

Another funny microsite is the counterfeit Mini spoof site. Brilliant!

What are your favorite microsites? Post a comment!

I have to say I prefer YouTube over Google Video, although the audio tends to be out of sync with the video, it's hard to locate the gems from all the crap, a lot of the comments are "if you liked that then check out this video" spams, and you can't download the videos for offline viewing.

Here's why I think YouTube rocks:

• It's developed a large, active community of users who comment on videos, rate videos, become friends, create favorites and playlists, etc.
• The way you can embed videos into your blog or site (see example below) is really well done
• Videos can have tags associated with them
• It's so easy to get sucked in to watch more videos once you're in there, through Related Videos, Playlists, Director Videos, Most Viewed, Top Rated, Most Discussed, Top Favorites, Most Linked, Recently Featured, Most Recent and Random

I'm not alone in my opinion that YouTube has Google Video beat. The Church of the Customer blog offers up 10 reasons why YouTube is better than Google Video, which include the vastly superior user interface, the viral "pass it on" and "put on site" functions, superior playback performance, the display of the number of times each video has been played, the user accounts, better search functionality (e.g. the ability to sort search returns by date added, title, view count and rating), the way three random frames from each video are displayed next to search results, the display of trackbacks, and the related video functionality.

Here's my favorite YouTube video to date. It's a segment from a Japanese game show called "Gaki no Tsukai ya Arahende" (Silent Library), where contestants suffer more and more outrageous tortures without being able to utter a sound:

My second favorite is the series of Star Trek action figure videos, including Crib, Karaoke and Poolside. You've got to check those out too.

Got any favorites to share?