If you are a regular of the social media scene, you have surely cam across those campaign that ask you to repost a quote on you Facebook profile.

One of my Facebook friend recently posted this:

“There’s a site called spokeo.com that’s a new online USA phone book with your personal info:everything from pics you’ve posted on FB or web, your credit score, home value and pix, income, age, children,etc. Remove yourself by searching for your name, copy the URL of your page, then go to the bottom of the page, click the Privacy button to remove yourself. Copy & re-post so your FB friends are aware.”

First of all, I am usually unmoved by those kind of things, so I didn’t think much about it. Then, I decided to dig just a bit more wondering what would be the effect of that campaign on their web site ranking.

So I went on Alexa.com and looked into their data and it turns out that the web site was pretty much completely ignored before that scary piece of advice first appeared on Facebook last year around March. At that point they went from a traffic rank of below “10000” to near 1000!

It then faded away in about two months and fell back almost as low as it was before. Then apparently, the scary message gained back traction on Facebook and now their US traffic rank is better than 500!

I would call than a marketing success lifting your traffic rank and your brand awareness so high without spending much at all!

If you are interested in knowing more about that site and danger I suggest you read this piece from last year in the “Urban Legends” section of about.com here

Fear is a legitimate marketing tools isn’t it?