The nature of marketing is changing so fast as online and offline are all mashed up - and that happened last week, on December 4th, to be exact

…when Conan O'Brien made a joke about a "Webcam manatee", on his late night show,  someone in a manatee costume rubbing himself or herself provocatively in front of a camera (to the tune of the 1991 hit "I Touch Myself") while a voyeur with a lascivious expression watched via computer.

At the end of the skit O'Brien mentioned that the voyeur was watching www.hornymanatee.com - only he made up the site on the spot - no such website existed at that moment."

Conan O'Brien's staff at NBC registered horneymanatee.com made up a site within a couple of hours with some quickly improvised pictures and got more than a  million visits within one week (the article says 3 million "hits" ).

But it got better as the site morphed into Social Media by allowing viewers to contribute their own clips and artwork to the site.

"….A week later, by Monday afternoon, hornymanatee.com — created by O'Brien's staff and featuring images of supposedly forbidden acts like "Manatee- on-Manatee" sex (again using characters in costumes) — had received about three million hits, according to NBC. Meanwhile, several thousand of O'Brien's viewers had responded to his subsequent on-air pleas that they submit artwork and other material inspired by the aquatic mammals, and any romantic and sexual shenanigans they imagine, to the e-mail address conan@hornymanatee.com."

A couple of points.

1) TV and Cable shows can create websites on the fly just like this - and probably should. 

a. One of the nice things about Hornymanatee.com - you have to serially progress though the pictures which can be used to see how engaged visitors are - how many pictures do they want to see".  This should be easy to pick up using almost any low to mid range Web Analytics package.

2. Use of Social Media allows such sites to have an almost unlimited amount of content for almost NO COST.

More and more companies are trying to figure out how to use Social Media to let their customers have a voice in their brands.  One of the things that came out of this post, and my last about setting up businesses in Second Life - if your too deliberate about it - it often does not work.

The nice thing about the Horny Manatee - it kinda of happened by accident - and NBC managed to make the right call quickly.