Thanks, froo, we did a little test of a couple of viral things (tag a friend / youtube etc) but to be honest they didn't really do so much, maybe because the content was cute but wasn't funny/shocking/bizarre enough...the hard part is to come up with a creative idea
I think really the best thing you can do is listen to your users, keep your fingers on the pulse of your site and then act accordingly.
In my case, I didn't create the rivalry, I simply listened to what the readers were saying and the discussion happening on other sites and reacted accordingly.
It's much easier to ride a wave than it is to create that wave.
Sidenote: There were a few negative effects of my antics, but I turned those lemons into lemonade. The people in the IRC channel at the time got a real kick out of what I was doing.
It ended up in the sites comments being spammed a little by Tokio Hotel fans in a short couple hour window, which luckily I noticed it as it was happening.
I actually found much joy when I noticed this occurring in realtime and redirected those particular people to a rickroll on YouTube using a 301 redirect for those specific IP's in the .htaccess file.
Actually the best use of this tactic (specific IP redirects) was to a certain Tokio Hotel fan/critic named Claire (admin of a TH fansite) who left a very nasty comment on the site. I simply set up a redirect for her IP to a subdomain on the site and a page I set up specifically for her in minutes.
She was very upset thinking I had somehow "hacked" her computer and had emailed me with all sorts of threats and many four letter words.
The site's users got a huge kick out of that. It was childish yes, but that's what the site required at the time. Stupid childish antics. It added to the site's notoriety and was free - word spread around about the antics and traffic increased as a result.
