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.