Viral Video - How To (#1)

The big question of the video marketing sphere (and one that I hear from most of my clients on a regular basis) is: “How do I create a viral video?“. More than four years into the YouTube era, and we’re seeing videos created with web cams, showing cats jogging on treadmills, a man that dances a quirky dance all over the word and a sexy girl singing about Obama, gathering tens of millions of views. What companies pay millions of dollars for, some people out there top, with just your basic equipment, and hardly any editing. Every business dreams about successfully capturing the masses’ attention with viral videos, using it’s own dancing man and a ridiculously simple production, with a budget to match.


{One of the most successful viral campaigns in recent years: "Where the hell is Matt?"}

Viral videos are top marketing devices, promoting websites, services, products or brand names. But how do go about creating them?
A lot of agencies promise their clients a successful viral video campaign. Well, the task is so challenging that it’s rare to see a successful paid viral video. Following a few basic rules could better the chances of a successful viral video campaign. A lot of thought and research in the pre-production stage, could result in a very simple and cost effective production and post production process.

This first post will discuss the basic elements of viral marketing. Next ones will discuss the actual designing of a viral video.
As research has shown, for people to spread an idea around (or a viral video in our case) they need to:
1. Understand the video. The story should either be simple, or easy to explain via video language.
2. Want to spread the video around. People will forward the video to their family and friends if they think that they might gain something from it. When video is involved, people usually gain enhancement of their prestige and social status. It might broaden their friends and family’s horizons in intellectual matters. It might make others laugh. It might give away discounts or free stuff. If considering a sub-conscious motivations – spreading a viral video around might show that they themselves are interested in intellectual matters of the day (that is why environmental videos receive a lot of viral pushing) or make a favorable connotation between them and good humor.
3. The effort of spreading the viral video is smaller than the benefit. Although spreading the word out now days involves a few clicks and a decision on who to send the email to, the competition is harsh. The supply of funny, interesting and free give away videos is enormous. Your video needs to stand out and the benefit to be great – more interesting, funnier and sexier than others.
In conclusion - viral videos take advantage of common motivations and behaviors. Clever viral video campaigns take advantage of common human motivations: The desire to be cool, greed, popularity, the desire to be loved and other basic social desires. The resulting urge to communicate and make a social impact produces billions of e-mail messages containing leisure messages (and lots of videos). Design a video marketing strategy that builds on simple messages, easy to spread and built on common motivations and behaviors of the intended target audiance, and you have a winner video.
Next stop: Designing the viral video.

With a shaky economy, opportunities are a rising

The markets are crashing, gas prices are volatile, funds are drying up. The business world is in chaos, clutching it's wallet tightly. My orediction - it will calm down in 6 months. We already are in recession. We have been for the past 6 months (even though the traditional economic indicators suggest the economy is only "slowing" down). These times are rough and demand financial introspection, especially in Wall-Street. As for us small businesses - this is time for seizing opportunities, for thinking outside the box and manuvering in a tightening market. This is the time for small vendors, with less overhead, to get contracts that were reserved for the big companies in the past. This is the time for companies and organizations to put more emphasis on marketing, and to do it with less cost. This is the time, and yes - I will be intorducing the same mantra again and again, to use web videos, and online campaigns. Less cost and a growing ROI. Just last week I attended a meeting of 70 non profit professional, gathered under the roof of NetSquared (http://www.netsquared.org/) in San Francisco and thirstily listening to a presentation by Nikki from Involver (http://www.involver.com/), provider of online social campaigns. I was astounded by the interest and acceptance with which the various directors greeted the new medium. Non profits are seeking new venues to raise funds, support and increase memberships. Online video provides a great answer, and great ROI, especially in dire times as this one.

Techcrunch50

I was lucky enough to attend the 3 days of techCrunch - the leading blog's convention, highlighting 100 new start-ups, 52 of them presenting on stage. I was awed by the innovation, the passion and the good ideas. To say that I'm inspired is an understatement. I'll write much more about it, especially about my future plans (did I mentioned that I'm inspired?), but for now- check out www.videosurf.com. They launched a new search platform for videos at TechCrunch, and it might revolutionize what we know about video search.

Online video marketing is taking two more baby steps

Well, two important news from two of the biggest video players out there. Video for the corporate world is taking more steps towards the corporate world in the marketing sphere. The first one: Metacafe. An Israeli based company (with offices in the Silicon Valley) announced that it will becomes the first video site to open its metadata for community contributions and editing. In simple words, this new feature (WikiCafe) will allow more than 34 million unique monthly viewers to add and improve the tags, titles and descriptions for the millions of videos on the site. This feature is a part of Metacafe's campaign to improve video search and recommendations. This feature will also force business owners to provide accurate information about the content of their video, and this will mean that video SEO (search Engine Optimization) will have to tie the knots even tighter – relating to the content of the video (containing the right keywords) and linking it to the descriptive text surrounding the video. Video SEO is becoming the next frontier in SEO work. You can read more about it in: http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/metacafe-wages-campaign-eliminate-tag/story.aspx?guid=%7B201D4AA8-5258-47CC-B074-03CDC342837B%7D&dist=hppr

The second big news is from Google video. Funny, just a week ago I shared an idea with a few colleagues, about developing a sort of YouTube platform for businesses. This platform will enable each business and corporation to offer it’s management and workers the ability to upload videos. Just imagine the sheer power of enabling the CEO to address the staff with a straight forward video, the VP of sales to create a video about a new product, and finally the customer service person to use a video guide intended for his peers. The next step, in my humble opinion, is to open it to the client base as well. Imagine the velocity of allowing clients and users to upload a video describing their experience with the product or service. As you can read in http://www.pcworld.com/article/150472/article.html, The idea is that anyone at a company--from CEO on down--can post a video, but the content will be accessible only to others at that company. Exciting news for the video industry. Why am I excited? Because e-Clips (http://www.eclipsvideos.com/) fits right in there. Some videos will need the caressing hand of professionals to create. Companies will not be able to handle all of their videos by themselves. Especially ones designed to address the out-of-the-company viewers.

More good news about online video, and an interesting challange for e-Clips

Last week I met with Gadi Mayer. A successful entrepreneur, sold a few companies, the most recent was Fraud Sciences to Ebay (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/28/ebay-acquires-fraud-sciences-for-169-million/). I has some questions about possibilities for the business and different visions I had. Most interestingly, the word “scalability” cam up again and again. “You could have a prosperous business”, said Gadi, “but if you really want a big company, think how you could make 10,000 videos a day”.
A challenge indeed, and the view to such an incredible company is blocked by a technological hurdle: video production now-days is dependant on an actual video camera, handled by an actual person (hopefully a professional), directed by a real person, and edited by another one. How do you create automization of the process? How do you scale video productions to the capability to create 10,000 videos a day? Need to invest a lot of thought into that, and will probably need another domain name, something shorter than http://www.eclipsvideos.com/. How about "Youtube"? Naaah. Stupid name.

Well, no answers yet. But questions are fun as well. Meantime, Gadi sent me this Wall Street Journal article, discussing online video ads production and claiming that: “Click- h rates for video ads are higher than they are for plain-image or text-only ads, statistics from Google's digital-marketing firm DoubleClick show.” (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121803438950516993.html).
Online video ads are gathering more and more speed, and it’s fun to watch, and even more exciting to participate.

Exciting future for online video

An encounter with a wonderful new start-up (can't reveal the name just yet) made me realize that e-Clips does much more than create video invitations. It does much more than create promotional videos for websites. e-Clips provides video marketing solutions. Still working on promotional videos, and video invitations, but with a much broader scope. And the need for video marketing solutions will continue rising, of that I am sure.

Many companies, including Google, are working on speech recognition systems for videos. And 3 weeks ago, Google announced the start of "voice to text" implementation on Youtube political videos (read about it here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/in-their-own-words-political-videos.html).
That means that we are moving into a new marketing era – an era in which video will be as important as text, if not more (well I do think that video “sells” better than text and pictures. It also means that we will start seeing video SEO services (Search Engine Optimization – basically improving a website’s rank on search engines). Hopefully e-Clips will be ahead of the curve regarding online video – we’ll continue creating promotional and marketing videos, video invitations for events, and who knows what else. And one final thing – the new website is up and running: www.eclipsvideos.com. As we say in the Hebrew land - Mazal Tov.

Good people along the way

The business trail is not an easy one, but sometimes it summons wonderful encounters. A few of those encounters happened last week, with people who are trying to help e-Clips, with no incentive but kindness.
I'll start with Jon Handlery, the proud owner of the Handlery hotels in San Francisco and San Diego (http://www.handlery.com/). I met Jon while shooting the doorman tribute video for the SFCVB, and interviewing his hotel's doorman. Last week I contacted him, seeking advice and help on getting the word out. He met with me a few days later, gave me incredible advice and guided me to other organizations who might help me. Helping a perfect stranger is not common in this world, I was truly touched by this show of kindness and generosity.
Last week I also met Lisa Cleveland and Dan Goldes from The SFCVB. I have no better words to describe the working relationship with the Bureau other than "a love story". They were a fantastic client. Quick, professional, punctual and full of constructive criticism and compliments. If there was a competition for “best client in the bay Area”, I would sign them up.
Lisa Cleveland, Director of Member Services for the SFCVB, met with me and gave me some good advice and helpful tips and recommendations on who to approach. Dan Goldes , executive vice president, strategy & development, met with me for coffee as well. He was kind, gave me some good networking tips (not one of my better skills) and people to talk with.
It is extremely hard to ask for help, especially from people I don’t know, especially in my unique position as an immigrant. I don’t do it too often, fearing that it might be taken as a sign of weakness, and that I might lose my independent business posture (even in my own eyes). I’m happy I did seek help. Besides helping me, all three showed kindness and belief in me, my company and in our video invitations. In this harsh business environment (even though everybody around is smiling politely, I can still feel “the race” for the fortune, the competition for a share in the limited pie of revenue), it is a good reminder that bottom line – it’s all about people. The bad, and I’m happy to say – the good. The very good.