The Viral Methodology?
Monday, November 26, 2007 at 8:39PM I think the moment the word "viral" officially hit it big was the day that Subservient Chicken started hitting inboxes, accumulating millions of hits and making Burger King just a bit cooler. After that, everyone wanted something viral, but no one really knew how to have a sure-fire hit. Clients wanted a site or video that's going to organically spread with minimal seeding and huge results. It's not easily achieved. For every successful produced viral video, there are thousands that lingered on youtube with only a few hundred views.
Dan Ackerman Greenberg, a recent guest poster on TechCrunch, discussed exactly what his company does to make something go viral. His suggestions for the video content are great -- make it 10-15 seconds, design it for re-mixing and don't make it look like an ad. However, it was a few of his seeding strategies that that caught the ire of the commenters.
Blogs: We reach out to individuals who run relevant blogs and actually pay them to post our embedded videos. Sounds a little bit like cheating/PayPerPost, but it’s effective and it’s not against any rules. Forums: We start new threads and embed our videos. Sometimes, this means kickstarting the conversations by setting up multiple accounts on each forum and posting back and forth between a few different users. Yes, it’s tedious and time-consuming, but if we get enough people working on it, it can have a tremendous effect.
I wasn't as surprised by Dan's post as a lot of the commenters seemed to be -- "unethical"was thrown around quite a bit -- but many of those strategies do have a SPAM quality to them. At the same time, Dan might be right. There have been huge viral successes and many, many more viral failures. We don't fully know how those videos made it to our inbox or our friend's Facebook page and we probably never will. I'd like to think that engaging content wins over all, but it was only a matter or time before this media began it's move from experimental to methodical.
The Secret Strategies Behind Many "Viral" Videos (TechCrunch)
