The recent Starbucks email promotion gives a great look at what the success of a viral campaign can do. The problem is that it was too successful so they had to suspend it.
DM News wrote that "the e-mail called 'Try your coffee' offered customers a free Grande beverage between noon and 9 p.m. through Sept. 30. The small print directed customers to print the e-mail and present it to baristas."
The reason that Starbucks gave was that the viral effect went way beyond the original purpose it was offered and was changed beyond its 
control.
There are two things to learn here:
First, who is your target audience? You would think that Starbucks would know better than this. Whoever is in their marketing department should have understood the power and ease of forwarding emails. How could they have possibly thought that the offering could be contained in any way? Evidently they were even being offered on eBay for sale.
Second, they obviously didn't understand how viral campaigns and what they offer can be altered during the process. This is one of those grey areas that have to be dealt with and thought through before anything is thrown out there to be shared.
It is far better not to send out something like this, than to close it down afterwards because it performed better than expected. With viral marketing, instead of assuming the worse to protect ourselves, we now need to assume the best, in order to figure out the consequences of being successful beyond what we imagined.
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