An amazing thing happened to UK based adventure holidays specialist Activities Abroad over the last 2 or 3 days. A controversial promotional email sent to the company customer mailing list sparked a nationwide controversy by offering 'chav-free' vacations.

For the benefit of our non-UK readers, Wikipedia explains the word Chav as generally referring to a "white aggressive teen or young adult, of working class background, who wears branded sports and casual clothing who often fights and engages in petty criminality and are often assumed to be unemployed or in a low paid job." The company mailing promised that on its holidays you wouldn't meet anyone with Chav-like names such as "Britney, Dazza, Chardonnay and Candice".

Although Director Alistair McLean insists "It was a tongue-in-cheek e-mail", a media storm soon ensued with coverage in major national newspapers like The Times, and McLean was also interviewed live on a major BBC radio show.

The result of all this media coverage was a massive surge in visitors to the Activities Abroad website which eventually threatened to engulf the servers. Over the period of just 24 hours the number of visitors to the website exploded by 1,100%.

The equivalent value of this additional visitor traffic in Pay Per Click terms is approximately £4,000 ($5,600) a day, however, the real value is in the additional vacation bookings that will undoubtedly result from this mass media coverage. As McLean explains, "We have had £300,000 worth of PR from this. We had a few nervous moments and knew it was a bold piece of PR but we're getting great results."

So, what can we online marketers learn from this experience? Well, first of all, it demonstrates the huge potential influence that Blogs have and how Blogging has empowered people to such an extent that they can now start a national media storm from their own kitchen table.

This whole controversy was sparked by one single blogger who received the company email and was so angered by its contents that he wrote about it on his travel blog. This was eventually picked up by news outlets across the UK and the rest, as they say, is history.

The second lesson is the amazing power of viral marketing. What started as one man's online rant evolved into a national controversy within a matter of hours. Viral marketing is nothing new, but it takes an event like this to remind us of just how powerful a tool it really can be.

The final lesson is that controversy sells. Whether deliberate or not, the content of the email shot was definitely controversial. Even though the company claim that the overwhelming response has been one of support, it only takes a few outraged individuals to create the kind of national level controversy that we have seen in this case.

Was this really a "tongue-in-cheek" email that threatened to backfire but eventually paid off brilliantly, or was it a piece of clever but highly cynical viral PR? Only a few people within Activities Abroad will know the answer. What is not in doubt is that the results were phenomenal and would delight any online marketing professional.