When the Offline Buzz Feeds Search

Last week, a friend forwarded me the URL of a video clip of two guys putting on a Bellagio-style fountain show by mixing Mentos and Diet Coke. Since then, it's turned into one of the most passed around viral videos of the year and has sparked so much interest that it's since been covered by quite a few news sources, blogs, web sites and water cooler commentators. (Take a glance if you haven't already seen it: Diet Coke and Mentos video) The question is, now that this video has made Diet Coke and Mentos a popular blog and search topic, what are the two companies doing to capitalize off of the interest spike?

Virally, there's no doubting the success of the campaign from the viewpoint of the site that is hosting it. Eepybird.com visits went from not even being high enough to rank on the Hitwise traffic scale to launching the site to #25 on the "Entertainment - Multimedia" category. While the extra traffic is likely going over quite well with the Eepybird.com team, the searches that have been sparked are for terms related to the products being used in the video.

HitWise's LeeAnn Prescott has a great post that talks about the spike in searches for phrases containing the words "Diet Coke" and/or "Mentos." She points out that the keyword breadth for "Mentos" increased by 142% week over week. "Diet Coke," already quite popular, still experienced a 34% increase. In fact, the phrase "Diet Coke and Mentos" actually gets more searches right now than the single word "Mentos" does, which is a great way to show that it's interest in the video that's causing such a sharp increase in searches for Mentos.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Mentos is relishing the attention but Diet Coke isn't quite so thrilled. Search wise...neither company is doing a very good job of using the interest to funnel traffic to their site. In fact, for the most popular search term combinations being reported by HitWise, neither company shows up on the first page of search results, nor have they taken out any type of paid search advertisements.

It's a shame...because that's an awful lot of search interest just waiting to be tapped...