The company's latest campaign for its Office Ultimate suite for students, The Ultimate Steal, features "playgrounds" where users can create avatars they can then send to friends to spread the word.

The playgrounds -- titled the "Ultimate College All-Nighter" and the "Ultimate College Idol" -- challenge students to create avatars and have them sing, belch, holler or wax poetic, or rave or brag about their sleepless nights. Microsoft then invites the students to share their avatars by placing a copy of them on their social networking site or webpage.

Students who create an avatar on the sites will be entered to win prizes, including a Microsoft Xbox 360 and games for the system.

"With The Ultimate Steal we've been trying a lot of standard marketing tactics, but this time we said we want to do something viral that can grow dynamically," Prasid Pathak, student lifestyle marketing manager for Microsoft, told ClickZ. "We're really hoping that the students get engaged with us and put it on their Facebook [profiles]; that's more powerful than me putting a banner ad somewhere."