Viral Secrets

This page created by Elliott Wall titled "Going Viral: The Secrets Behind Viral Videos".

The JK Wedding Entrance Dance. Double rainbow. Antoine Dodson, the “bed intruder.” We’ve all seen or heard of them; whether it is from a friend or a referring site, these YouTube sensations have racked up millions of views and have been shared across the Internet. They’ve become, in every sense of the word, viral.

Going viral – reaching millions of viewers via the spread across the Web – is the ultimate goal of nearly everyone that posts a video on YouTube or any other video-sharing site. Not only do individuals long for this success but also business, who see viral sharing as a valuable marketing tool; just look at the success of Old Spice’s “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaign. But of the tens of thousands of videos that are uploaded each day, very few will be seen by more than 10,000. So, the question is, what makes a video go viral? (Henning 2010)

Henning, M 2010, “Making The Most of Online Video”, AdNews.

It All Starts With an Idea

In the recent Hollywood blockbuster “Inception,” Leonardo DiCaprio’s character skillfully explains that an idea is the most resilient virus. This is true in videos as well; after all, it’s an idea, a concept or mental impression that attracts us to a video in the first place. But what makes a concept go viral? Dynamic Logic conducted a study on this subject and found that the acronym LEGS partially describes what a video’s content needs to go viral.

Laugh

Edgy

Gripping

Sexual

True, we all enjoy watching something that makes us laugh, feels new, and appeals to our human desires, but there is an argument to me made that it also needs to be real. Indeed, each of the videos at the beginning of this article was real; they were not purposefully staged and financed for business purposes, but what about the Old Spice promotion? That was certainly was not real (in the sense that it was deliberately planned and funded), but it clearly went viral.

Viral Advertising

Getting an advertisement to go viral is quite different than any ordinary video. Undoubtedly, most businesses would love their ad to go viral, but it is arguably more challenging for ads to go viral, as there is a fundamental change in the mind of viewers

when they watch a video they know is intended to sell them something.

Sharethrough is a company whose sole purpose is to create viral videos for clients. If their creations don’t receive 100,000 views, they don’t charge. Now, in addition to having LEGS, the founders of Sharethrough explain that advertisements need to have several other characteristics. Most importantly, they must not be out right ads (like the Old Spice commercials), and they must be designed for remixing and sharing.

Web 2.0 and Viral Sharing

Sharing is essential in order for a video to go viral, and Web 2.0 is an integral part of this distribution. Blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, and tagging all operate under the banner of Web 2.0 and all help spread viruses. Just like contact proliferates viruses among humans, blogs and social networking sites multiply the views that videos receive through a process known informally as “Osmosis Marketing”. This is why it is so important for ads (or any video for that matter) to be sharable. No video would go viral without being spread across Facebook, Twitter, e-mail lists, and the blogosphere. Re-mixing, too, can add a significant number of views (the Bed Intruder song is a perfect example). But in order for people to share and remix a video, the content, the concept must appeal to them. They must want to distribute the idea to their social environment; they must want to spread the virus (Wesch 2007; Hemsley, Walker 2010; Howe, J 2006).

Hemsley; Walker 2010, “Fifteen Minutes of Fame: the Role of Blogs in the Life Cycle of Viral Political Information.” Policy & the Internet, pp. 2-3.

Howe, J 2006, “The Rise of Crowdsourcing” Wired Magazine, pp. 1-5

Wesch, M 2007, “What Is Web 2.0? What Does It Mean for Anthropology?” Anthropology News, pp. 30-31.