Viral Content - Getting your visitors to do your link building

Vitral Content :- The buzzwords viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives (such as product sales) through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses. It can be word-of-mouth delivered or enhanced by the network effects of the Internet.[1] Viral promotions may take the form of video clips, interactive Flash games, advergames, ebooks, brandable software, images, or even text messages. [more]

When we're working on a website's SEO we generally try to avoid focusing our efforts into link building by only submitting to directories, blog posts, forum's, etc...
Recently for our own site we created and published this page dreamt up after a pretty dull afternoon at the office and submitted it to a few joke sites. Content such as this always has the potential to go 'Viral' but it can be a bit hit and miss.
After a few weeks we had forgotten about the page and figured it would spend the rest of its life in a dusty corner of our website... until Saturday when a Page Rank 8 humour website linked into the page from it's homepage. Within seconds traffic on our website rocketed up to a level we'd not seen before for a single page and by the end of the day the website traffic was 30,000% up on the previous week!

Now, 3 days later, we are still looking at heavy traffic for this one page as other humour websites have picked up on the page and linked in. All impressive but not really viral yet as we're just piggy backing traffic off these sites.
Deep in the stats though the first hints of the page 'going viral' can be seen. Web 2.0 sites sharing the link, Email's to friends, family and colleagues all indicating that once the traffic dies down the link will still be passed around.

All sounds good but of course it isn't making us any money so what's the point of it?
Well this is exactly the kind of content that people want to show to others and so will bookmark, email, stumble and post links on forums, blogs and other websites they have access to. Places where you yourself could not ordinarily post a link and will continue to generate links for a long time to come - Win Win all around.