Generally, Viral Marketing is a one-hit wonder kind of business.

Take for example “Snakes On A Plane”:

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Or maybe “ShaveEverywhere”:

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Virals are the “I Melt With You” or “Puttin’ On The Ritz” of the Internet marketing business. (SEO is “Dark Side of the Moon”, SEM is “Nevermind”.) At the risk of overextending the metaphor, my team at Tucows is looking for catmas.com to be our White Christmas — a perennial, seasonal hit.

Here’s how Joey “Accordion Guy” DeVilla (Tucows’ Technical Evangelist) got newbies up-to-speed on the festivities:

Back around the fall of 2003, Ross [Rader] and I wanted to come up with a little event to commemorate the launch of Blogware, the software with which our blogs (and this blog) are built. It didn’t take long for us to settle on “Post a Picture of a Cat to Your Blog Day”, an unwieldy title that refers to the cliche that bloggers always post pictures of their cat on their blogs. The day took place on Friday, October 3rd, 2003 and enough blogs participated for us to call it a success. From that day forth, we declared that the first Friday in October would be the official day on which you should partake in that most bloggy of blog activities: posting a picture of a cat on your blog.

The following year, we gave the day a pithier name: BlogACatMas, and more people contributed. By 2005, BlogACatMas had caught the attention of the Canadian national newspaper, the Globe and Mail, which made mention of our holiday in an article titled The Truth About Cats and Blogs. This year marks the fourth instance of our special holiday, whose name we’ve shortened to Catmas (although “BlogACatMas” is still an acceptable usage) and registered as its own domain,Catmas, the home of this blog, whose purpose is to keep the Catmas spirit alive all year ‘round.

Catmas 2006 will take place this Friday, October 6th. We encourage you to post pictures of cats — they don’t have to be your cats, any ol’ cat will do — to your blog and tell us about it in the comments of this blog! Just remember the funnier or cuter the picture of the cat, the better. p. We’ll do a bit of a deconstruction on the results of BlogACatMas 2006 once all the fur settles. (And if you have a blog, we’d love it if you’d post your kitty pics and let us know at “catmas.com”.)

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Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on October 4, 2006.