About Viral

Signs and Her Morning Elegance are Content (Production) Based Virals

Good creative video production has a significant place amongst the other virals as Her Morning Elegance tops 6.1 million and Signs is now well over 1.2 million. 

Her Morning Elegance

These two pieces of art represent videos that grow out of the content production side of the viral model (bottom).  In Her Morning Elegance it is visually obvious to see why it has a multi million view count.  The popularity comes from the time and effort it would take to create this clip.  

Source: Tubemogul

Looking at Signs the catch is not as easily identifiable.  The video uses storytelling as its hook and holds your attention long enough to want some answers.  The two subjects of the film draw you into voiceless suspense and use classic narrative techniques to elevate your emotions throughout a 12 minute video.  

Since it was uploaded to YouTube on January 29th Signs has roughly averaged 18k (views) a day.  Looking at the graph shown on the left suggests Signs is a typical content based viral as the daily average (views) has dipped recently to roughly 10k but the cumulative views show little indication of flattening over the last two weeks proving the clip has some “stickiness”.     

Signs

In the book Made to Stick, which positions itself as an addition to Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, authors Chip and Dan Heath outline 6 guidelines to making a message sticky.  Keeping a message simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional and using stories help people remember whatever it is your trying to communicate.  

These six guidelines aren’t new to marketers and can be found lacing your consumer behaviour textbooks but the examples provided within Made to Stick help understand in depth what is occurring to achieve the stickiness.  These videos utilize these concepts as Signs tell a story and Her Morning Elengance shows you video in an unexpected way. 

Signs and Her Morning Elegance are in a class of viral in which the distribution channels spring up almost organically.  Links, friends emailing each other, Facebook posts and blogs picking up the clips as a cool content piece help develop their channels of distribution from a pull factor rather than a sponsored push strategy. 

Source: AboutViral

From the model above you can see that the circles of mainstream interest may still be focused on niche markets towards the outside depending on how the clips started to snowball.  The outer rings for example would be full of film buffs whose specific interests lead them to consider these creative pieces as deserving of recognition.  The inner circles then would ultimately move more towards those groups of people who find the story intriguing or the stop motion extremely unique while not yet understanding what stop motion is or how long that actually takes to produce.    

Cheers!

Note: Her Morning Elegance is a music video so it has the distinct advantage of music as a catalyst.