There are exactly one hundred million billion new viral marketing campaigns seeded every 10 minutes - the vast majority are completely dire and destined to fail. So what separates success from failure? Well, the best appear to exhibit similar patterns and by using these patterns in your own campaigns you could be on your way to a free buffet and a drunken snog at next Summer’s Revolution Awards.
Apparently, the key to getting enormous amounts of traffic to your YouTube video is to place suggestive imagery at just the right moment of your clip. Suggestive enough for people to think it’s porn. This public service announcement appears to have had over 72 million very disappointed views.
It’s probably appropriate to begin by defining our terms. The concept of viral marketing represents a very broad church, commonly used to describe any marketing initiative (predominantly but not exclusively digital) designed to encourage our innate desire to share the things we find appealing; for the benefit and enjoyment of others, and to express something about ourselves as propagators.
Successful viral marketing campaigns create community distributed or propagated content. Online this could be imagery, a video, an application, a game, a story, a simple document or virtually any other piece of digital content. Generally speaking viral initiatives can be categorised as:
Pass along
Self-contained viral pieces, often video or imagery, but sometimes just text, that can be attached and forwarded peer-to-peer, primarily by email or MMS. Often these pieces are also seeded into community sites, viral archives, or across the blogsphere.
Hosted
Self-contained experiences that are hosted on a website or specially developed microsite. This approach avoids the inherent problems with pass along material, and allows a richer, more interactive experience.
Incentivised
A broad category, primarily hosted in structure, describing viral concepts that integrate a direct incentive for users to alert their peers to the piece. Often a part of a prize draw, competition or challenge mechanism.
When talking about viral marketing, we’re generally referring to intentional virals. It’s worth noting that some of the most widely distributed viral pieces are actually non-intentional, or at least non-commercial, primarily due to the power of YouTube and social networking sites. One video that consistently finds itself at the top of the viral charts is StarWars Kid, whose star has made a career of fighting to earn royalties from the est. 900m of impacts his stolen video performance has received.
Here’s something interesting if you’re of a planning persuasion. It’s called BrandTags and it take adjectives that relate to brands and displays them as a tag cloud. It’s a wonderful little idea based on the premise that brands are nothing but the words we use to describe them. It’s certainly the start of something every interesting. The way the chap has built it right now is just displaying them as tag clouds, which isn’t all that helpful given that you have to scroll for miles. I can very much see this being opened up with an API to allow people to build new and exciting interfaces for it such as bubble charts etc. I could also see him doing something like LoveMarks where it could become a kind of WikiPedia-for-brands-meets-Facebook. This information could even be connected to your Attention Profile in some manner.
The Times reports that CERN, the place responsible from bringing us Le Internet has gone and done it again. They’ve invented the Grid, which is a system that works much faster than the normal Internet.
The grid isn’t to be made for use by consumers initially but is intended to analyse billions of Mbs of data from from the Large Hadron Collider which is attempting to discover some particle that is proving ellusive (I have no idea what this is but the Register does). But what does really interest me is the fact that this technology could be exploited by telecoms providers to help increase broadband speeds.
Apparently, nobody will bother saving anything to their own computer and just save it to the grid instead. Sounds good to me, I kind of already do this with Google apps. It essentially means that we’re another step closer to ubiquitous computing, if you’re into that kind of thing.
CERN Accellerator Complex
Following on from my earlier post about Virgin Media’s new snitch policy, it set me off thinking over my lunch in very long sentences about the ramifications of this. The main (really long) sentence goes as follows. If the government is gong to legislate that the BPI can force ISPs to give them their logs to enable them to snoop for perpetrators of Internet crimes against creativity then surely it follows that individual content creators also have those same rights? If the BPI can have such access, why can’t the average Joe on the street take a look and see how his content is being passed around?
Essentially, what I’m saying is that it is likely that, if this legislation is successful, ISP logs will become public access. This then may mean tools become available (probably made available by someone like Google who seem to release these type of category-smashing tools for fun while their working on something more important), such as those used by Hitwise to analyse ISPs to provide meaningful statistics. The statistics would allow, in essence (as the excellent Hitwise service does) people to see any form of online activity, particularly P2P sharing. Essentially, it would be like making public everything you do in the comfort of your own home.
So where does the access stop? Who isn’t a content creator these days? From big corporations using ad agencies to create stunning visual pieces to Tay Zonda creating, well, stunningly awful but incredibly infectious music. Don’t they all have the right to be able to trace how their content is being passed around. And given that no one body is ever likely to be trusted, funded or even liked enough by enough content owners and creators to take the task up, it makes sense that it’s carried out by the content creator themselves, should they chose to do so.
I’m aware that in actual fact, the BPI is a representative industry body and, as such may have authoratative powers to execute decisions about the misuse of ISPs. But the ramifications of this arrangement go on and on.
Really interesting example of ASCII art in paid search, if only it was possible, I’m not convinced that it ever actually ran. This is a classic illustration of the potention for diffusion within advertising. Apparently Google doesn’t allow this on account of repetitive punctuation. Well, at least we don’t have to put up with doubel exclamation marks. BUY NOW!! L@@K
Found via Martin’s comments on Iain’s post about search. Search being an area I certainly need to ‘wonk off’ on.
To me, Fader’s news of Blu’s challenge of releasing 763 albums (all collaborations), supported by 1,892 videos over the course of the approaching summer is an extreme example of how digital is changing way we consume music. With over 16,000 friends on MySpace, he’s certainly got the support. Without the creative restrictions of a major label deal it looks like he’ll simply be putting everything out and allowing the natural filter of the hardcore fans to decide what sinks or swims. In Blu’s own words “YallProllyBeSickOfHearingYaBoyBy’09″.
It reminds me of Sufjan Steven’s attempt to write an album for every state in America.
Exciting times indeed.
Update: Not sure if the Fader claim was an April Fools but they’ve removed the story now. Still funny.
Another very interesting report from Pew that segments technology use. Very useful if you’re working in digital and trying to understand levels of involvement online.
Cheers Fiona.
The music service Last.fm, which acts as you own personal MP3 player has never been quite as good as it could. The problem being that it could only play 30 seconds of tracks by more popular artists. That was until now, well, as of Wednesday. “As of today, you can play full-length tracks and entire albums for free on the Last.fm website.” You can only play it 3 times before you have to pay for it, which seems to me to be more than fair to all involved and is a model made possibly by the support of all four major labels. The subscription service hasn’t launched yet but when it does it will allow you unlimited listening. It’s all very exciting, it seems that the major labels are basically adopting a number of different models, essentially allowing people to consume music in the way they best want to consume it. Fair enough really.
In other music news, Yahoo! is also going to be giving away DRM-free music and perhaps unsurprisingly, CD sales are slumping while digital download sales are growing, but not growing enough.