The US Defense Department celebrated the Internet’s 40^th birthday by releasing some balloons into the air! Quite the festive idea you would think, but actually they’ve released the balloons for a social media experiment. They released 8 foot wide red balloons in 10 different locations across the US. The US Defense Department announced that they would award $40,000 to the person who finds all 10 locations of the balloons that were released. The idea of the social media experiment was that people would use online social networks to communicate and interact with others and find all of the locations the fastest. Social networks such as Twitter and Facebook were used to find out the whereabouts of the balloons.

source: http://www.deviantart.com

Social networks that were originally created for individual online recreational purposes to communicate and interact with friends and family are now being used by businesses to promote their websites, products and services. The act of using a social network to direct quality traffic for your business website is referred to as social media optimization. Social media optimization is the most popular Internet marketing strategy used by businesses today. Social media optimization not only directs quality traffic to business websites but also improves website rankings and increases brand name awareness.

source: http://balloon.media.mit.edu/

Georgia Tech and MIT are among the educational institutions that participated in this social media experiment to find the coordinates of the released balloons. Georgia Tech actually decided in advance that if they accomplish in finding the coordinates first they would donate all $40,000 to charity. Unfortunately they never got the chance as MIT eventually was able to accomplish this amazing feat first. I wonder how fast it would take for a team to figure out the coordinates of balloons released on a world wide level. I can just imagine people twittering from India, others using Facebook from Russia and other parts of the world to let people know the whereabouts of red balloons they’ve seen floating in the sky.

source: http://news.cnet.com

The US Defense Department will be meeting with all of the participants to find out what strategies and methods were used. The most crucial aspect of their social media experiment was to understand effective methods of communication and why some were more successful than others. The team from MIT who won the cash award found all of the locations of the balloons in less than 9 hours! They found the balloons by creating a website where people could register and invite their friends to register and update with any information about the balloons. The MIT team had decided that they would give out the cash as incentive for people to come and sign up and give information readily. $2000 was given to the first person who correctly gave information about the location of a balloon. $1000 was given if you invited the person who gave the correct coordinates. $500 to whoever invited you and $250 to the person that invited that person. All in all it made for a very interesting experiment and it seems like it was also enjoyable for those who participated.

It’s nice to see that people take the time to appreciate the historic moments of our technological advancements that we usually take for granted. If you want to see the results of a social media optimization campaign for your business website, consult an experienced offshore SEO company. Offshore SEO companies from India are experienced with handling websites for small businesses as well as large corporation websites to give you the results you need. They will have a range of SEO packages and social media optimization services your website can benefit from.