About Viral

The Not So Secret Viral Marketing Strategies

On the subject of Viral Videos one question prevails when people sit down and think about viral marketing strategies: is content king?

In previous decades the question was debated through examples of companies like Comcast and Disney (who almost joined under one umbrella way back when).  Comcast and Disney both flirted with the idea of having Pocahontas and Simba following through cable pipelines controlled by one entity, but they are still pitted to battle over what is king. 

When the distribution nuke (commercial Internet) dropped, companies like YouTube formed and Dan Ackerman Greenberg released an article in November 2007 titled “The Secret Strategies Behind Many “Viral Videos”.  The article itself has reached an astounding number of comments (757, March 16th 2008) and rehashed the argument as to whether content is king in this New Media age.      

The comments, like any really good article, are full of opinions from both sides.  Some recognize that marketing has been manipulatively presenting material for years only the back end work took place in the pubs, restaurants and clubs that the newspaper editors or TV tycoons use to hang out in.  Now the playing field has moved online.

Secondly, others think it’s disgusting and that Dan is ruining the credibility of the Internet as a medium, instilling paranoia and distrust in the readers of online content.  

Thirdly, the middle of the spectrum opinions outline a few things that Dan is doing are actually unethical, such as having a conversation with himself via fake users (creative self spamming) but, see the value in the other strategies present.         

Here is the fine line between promotion and spamming.  Dan’s claim that there’s just too much content out there to dream of your video ever becoming viral rings like a justification for the strategy but viral videos still make it to most viewed pages organically.  It depends on the subject matter of content.  

Dan is right in the sense that a video designed to steer an audience towards an agenda of driving attention or sales to a company is not the most appealing content for the majority.  Therefore, the Comotion Group has decided to implement these tactics to compete with the mass amount of “real” videos that they are competing against.  

The above posted video shows the irony of his claim that content is not king.  There are numerous examples of organic content going through a series of events to reach Viral status.  Cue Star an A Cappella Tribute, Her Morning Elegance or Everything’s Amazing Nobody’s Happy to name a few recent ones.  

The category of content Dan needed to promote (trailers) is said to be the Film Cloverfield.  Trailers have marketing budgets and can be referred to as “Flu Virals”.  They appear, are extremely visual and exciting, everyone talks about them, the release date comes, the actual (peer) reviews come out and people are inoculated getting their fix or decide it’s not worth it.  
Arguably there are a few trailers that change the upper echelon of viral videos.  Slumdog Millionaire for one, but that film boast pure quality.  It won numerous Oscars and is scored with an example of viral music; MIA’s Paper Planes.      

Finally, the concept within the Cloverfield trailers is driven by content.   The fact that you never see the monster in the clips isn’t a distribution element.  It is a classic tactic of suspense creation.  To borrow from Lucky Number Slevin’s line “That’s when villain is most effective”.   

Content is king.  Certain people or companies, with built up networks focusing on certain subject categories will be able to influence the attention specific content gets.  This is especially true if they implement Dan’s tactics but by no means should this be considered the Bible of viral marketing, maybe just a chapter in Revelations.

Cheers!

Update March 20th: Zideo.nl is a video content site and the founder has this strategic advice for youth when making their videos.    

Create the video around these guidelines:   50% Content, 15% Metadata, 20% Thumbnail and 15% Promotion