The 4 Myths of Viral Video

"Get me a viral video that's as popular as Dove Evolution (7+m views) or Free Hugs (17m views)." Which is kind of up there with the start-up that intends to launch a new social network and uses MySpace as their competitive barometer. It's not simply that it's hard to reach these goals. We do "hard" every day. It's that the goals and tactics demand re-examination.

Myth 1

The fist myth of commercial use of viral video, is that video online is the natural replacement for television. While runaway hits like Dove Evolution can rack up millions of views and lots of related word of mouth (WOM), these are the exception, not the rule. Television remains the great 'reach' medium. The Internet is the great 'engagement' medium. Trying to use the internet simply to raise awareness via a reach strategy ignores it's basic value. Online video offers a gateway to enagement one-click away. The statistics on video usage and sharing online do make clear it's potential. Ben McDonnell has a great post that sums up the stats from Pew (e.g. 57 million Americans watch online video content every day - 19% of American adult Internet users). Which brings us to the second myth.

Myth 2
A viral video is a digital strategy. That's the myth. A viral video is a video that you hope will grab people's attention to the point that they will tell their friends about it. It is something that must be remarkeable (literally), surprising, insightful or otherwise engaging. It may last as much as a few minutes. And then it is done. Where do our users, customers, people go? Out to buy the product? Ready to fill out a survey with all sorts of warm and fuzzies about the brand?

We have an opportunity to really get involved with customers online. We can get their input, their ideas. We can demonstrate that we really care about them and their business. Providing them with a LOL video (we could only hope for laughter) is certainly one way to provide value - entertainment value. But it is a shallow short-lived way. What can we drive them to do? Create their own video(s)? Appear on our "show"? Write the script or create story ideas? Email or hold a blog conversation with someone featured in our show? All of these convert the video idea into so much more than an awareness blip in a equally cluttered horizen.

Myth Part 3
Plopping a video on YouTube is a digital strategy. That's the third part of the myth. It says that something that is worth talking about will find its own audience organically (i.e. with no marketing effort) and will gain viral velocity until it reaches millions. Duncan Watts would point out that most 'viral' things die off before reaching what anyone would claim is a tipping point of volume. If part of a digital strategy includes video(s) that will grab people's attention then we need to support them with smart, authentic promotion. Viral videos go better with outreach and advertising. This seems couterintuitive if you as a marketer are using video to raise awareness of some engagement opportunity with your brand online. Now we want you to promote the promotion? If you are designing a truly engaging experience for your users than this will make sense. If you want to use video as your entire strategy, then it may not make sense.

How can you tell if something will go viral? Do you try different things and see what works (This is a basic tenant of Popular Media's approach - one that I admire)? Or do you find discrete ways to test? Nigel Hollis at Millward Brown (another WPP company) had a great post about this. here is an excerpt:

"To close, there is one point made in the Ad Age article with which I cannot agree. It states,

“In Mr. Watts’ chaotic conception of the world, you might as well try to plan for a terrorist attack or some other random event….’We cannot predict what is going to happen,’ [Duncan] said. ‘Things happen randomly. You want strategies that don’t depend on being right, but do depend on being able to measure things very well. You throw things out there, with as low cost as you can manage and with as great a diversity as you can stand and then you see what gets taken up.’”

Things happen randomly if you do not plan and test, and throwing things out there risks a potential backfire. The one factor that is not considered by Duncan’s analysis is the “stickiness” of the idea behind a viral campaign, and that is certainly not immune to testing. There is no reason why you cannot pre-test a viral campaign. The objective would be to ascertain the likelihood that people would share the ad with others and it would reduce the chances of failure by ensuring people did find the content relevant, compelling and worth sharing."

Myth  4
Bloggers and message board posters are just waiting to talk about marketers mediocre videos. That's is the myth about outreach. "Can't you just tell bloggers about the video and they will chatter about it on their blog?" Even if a traditional mareketer doesn't utter these exact words, it is often in their head. Paid media is one thing. But to engage people in word of mouth the "it" must pass the "who cares" test. If so, then you have earned their coverage. Yes, this is the fundamentals of 'earned media.'  Can we get people to talk enthusiastically about something that doesn't measure up? Sadly, no. What we are good at is creating compelling experiences that engage people genuinely. Videos can be a part of that but are rarely the centerpiece.

Here's another good summary of some of the stumbling blocks for successful use of viral videos in marketing strategy from Kevin Nalts, Will Video for Food.

Comments

[Andrew]

All good points. I agree with Nigel's comment about pre-testing content. Too often, 'viral' ideas get baked and produced in a vacuum -- without a clear read on how viewers will react. Then all eyes turn to the PR agency to make the (less-than-compelling) video spread. I wrote about this a few months back:

http://tinyurl.com/26jnaq

[Lonelybloggers]

I agree largely on your myths of viral video, but not entirely.

Viral video actually is a digital strategy, placing your video on YouTube is a digital strategy too -- You just need to know how to do it correctly that will create opportunity over time. You can't do that over a coffee at StarBucks or in the board room in a trendy office.

You speak directly to the value of the actual video content itself, not about how videos are picked up by search engines - which all and all is actually more important than the video itself unfortunately.

Most agencies don't really have an idea to how to leverage search engines to do the work for you, rather than relying on the creative only. Over the years, I've found that most interactive agencies (big and small) are great in talking up strategy, but fall well short on implementation tactics.

You are bound to fail if you think that simply throwing up a video on the net is going to take off on it's own. With all of the millions of videos out there, you need to know how your video is going to be identified in all of the search engines.

1 - blog about your videos and create links that the search engines will pick up

2 - pay attention to keywords, title descriptions, search terms - critical

3- build awareness via subscriptions, friends and comments, you'd be surprised how viral works over time

4- don't spend $100,000 on one video, instead spend $50,000 on 50 short and varied videos and build up your video inventory (links, links, links)

Our results on YouTube were terrible in the beginning, we didn't start to gain a foothold until we started working through the inner-workings of Youtube before our numbers started to increase.

With 900,000 total views on YouTube to date and 8000-10,000 views per day now, we are getting better results now than when we originally posted the videos months ago.

There are hundreds of video sharing sites you can post your videos to. Google spiders them all, make sure you have your search engine strategy in place and make sure to learn how each video sharing site works for optimization.

As a small startup, we don't have a big marketing budget but right now our main source of traffic is from video search engine traffic and clicks from our videos directly from the video sharing sites. To say that using video isn't a digital strategy is clearly wrong.

Many experts love to talk about the effectiveness of video (or lack of), but until you actually sit down and understand how aggressively search engines are seeking video content right now. People rarely understand how video content is seeded or the search engine value of creating such links, because there's little information on the web about it and for the people that do know they aren't about to share it.

I'll gladly take 10,000 views of our vids per day (we don't pay for bandwidth) and generate brand awareness for our little startup. My advice is to test, test, test and measure everything. I've learned more about internet marketing in the last nine months, than I have in the last 10 years.

Agency and industry experts have no clue what they are talking about when it comes to online video beyond their traditional broadcast knowledge based on TV and other marketing mediums. Even cutting-edge interactive things done 3 years ago, is really old news.

If you don't know how video is indexed by search engines as of right now and if you're not intimate with YouTube then you really don't know anything about how to get your videos seen (it has nothing to do with creative).

We expect our videos to continue to be seen thousands of times per day for months to come. Not bad for the $10,000 we spent to have 50 videos produced for us... (I guess most agencies don't want to throw around that number, I've heard the average viral video campaign is $50k-$250k in agency land.)

Online video is not print, it's not TV or radio - So you can't apply your working knowledge to this medium. I used to love ripping apart agency people when they came in exposing what they didn't know about online.

Google is the main driver behind volume, not the creative -- I wish agency people would stop talking about something that in all reality know little to nothing about.

Talk about strategy and creative is cheap, show me the results. So making wide sweeping claims about viral/online video is just.. well just plain silly.

[Viral Videos]

Great article. Also, great comment Lonelybloggers. Good to see both sides of things all in one place :)

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