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E-card campaign looks to go viral again

Relaxnews

Thursday 18 November 2010 01:00 GMT

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One of Christmas's longest-running viral campaigns, "Elf Yourself," is back for Christmas 2010, giving users a chance to transform themselves into elves and forward their elfish season's greetings to friends and family.

The Elf Yourself Christmas campaign has run annually since 2007, and the website recently relaunched for the Christmas 2010 campaign. Users of Elf Yourself can upload pictures of themselves or others from their desktop, Facebook account or, for the first time this year, their webcam. Photos of friends and family can also be added in the background as dancing elves and then forwarded on as greetings cards.

The viral video campaign previously attracted internet news coverage when in 2009 an organized group of elves took part in a dancing flash mob in Union Square, New York, and an "elf yourself" video of popular American pop brand the Jonas Brothers attracted over 40,000 views on YouTube. In addition to hosting Elf Yourself, companies JibJab and American department store Office Max also run other Christmas-themed websites, allowing users to transform themselves into carol singers or even Scrooge.

Though lacking the YouTube popularity of Elf Yourself, thousands of other e-card companies allow for a personalized message. A small selection of these e-card companies includes http://www.ecards.co.uk, http://www.flashgreetingscards.com, http://www.got-free-ecards.com/, http://www.hdgreetings.com/ and http://www.vidigreet.com/.

Though the Elf Yourself viral campaign may attract coverage from technology blogs such as Mashable.com, digitalbuzzblog.com and viral blog.com it is still far from the most popular Christmas-themed video on YouTube. That honor belongs to American pop group the Backstreet Boys singing "Christmas Time," which as of November 17 had 2,132,745 views.

Elf Yourself: http://www.elfyourself.com/

Elf Yourself on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/elfyourself#p/a

For more JibJab cards see: http://sendables.jibjab.com/section/sy_movies?cmpid=cj_holiday_468x60