Moo's online Easter egg hunt a fun diversion, brilliant viral marketing

Viral marketing be damned, sometimes time spent searching the depths of the Internet for small, tucked-away items can be fun. Especially when you're rewarded from your efforts.

Web-printing company Moo is running its own Easter egg scavenger hunt in conjunction with several other hip online companies like Etsy, Blurb, Ponoko, and Picnik. People are supposed to hunt down small Easter eggs on the various services and claim them. Moo is also bundling some of the eggs in products sent to customers in the next week. Meanwhile, the company keeps track of who has found what, and awards various prizes from the partnered sites.

In addition to the Easter eggs found online, Moo is also venturing out into the real world (which it calls the "great outdoors") starting on Saturday. Real world eggs will be placed around cities with special codes people can claim, and hints are provided in the form of poems on Moo's blog (complete with rhyming couplets).

I've seen a lot of viral campaigns in my day, including one from Nick.com that was previewed a couple of weeks ago at Adobe's Engage event. None of them really seem to offer much in the way of user benefit--besides the potential of a prize or hidden piece of content that's usually been leaked elsewhere or is too inconsequential to warrant the time and effort spent. In this case, Moo's gone the route of tying together a small band of blogs and services its demographic is likely to enjoy using.

The rules are simple. Finding the hidden mystery eggs may not be, however.

(Credit: Moo Print LTD. )

[flared0ne]

If you're planning to go "hunting", need to be ready to hit <ALT><Prt Scr> to capture a screen shot -- 'cause several I've seen showed up during transitions between pages, and they didn't hang around more than a couple of seconds.

[sharpandsmooth]

so wheres the hints....wheres the poems....wheres moos blog...lets get this thing started!

[mkumarphp]

Has anyone out there heard about WideCircles.com. It seems like a way better service then wasting money on PPC. Apparently they are using refering websites ( forums, blogs, wiki, etc. ) and have a viral word of mouth distributed approach to it. My friend told me he got around 100 visits from single post which cost him $0.40c. I am going to give them a try today . In case you are intrested here is it. http://widecircles.com?s=imt1