Posts from — September 2008

Only a small fraction of the tens of thousands of videos uploaded to YouTube daily will reach 100,000 plus viewers, which is one of the benchmarks used for a video to be considered “viral” on YouTube.

The elements of a viral video that allows it to reach that level fall into two buckets: above board best practices and below board ways to game the system.

The above board elements of a viral video include:

Can Answer A Simple Question: “Why would someone want to share this video with others?” – whether it’s funny, controversial, racy, unique, or just plain strange, all viral videos must be “share worthy”.  There is a certain element of “badge value” that comes from sharing something with your friends that you know that they would enjoy, especially if you are the first.  A video then becomes a form of social currency, to hopefully be exchanged exponentially.

Video Is Well “Branded” – the title and the thumbnail video image need to jump past the other video competition.  By understanding thumbnail optimization and how to write an engaging title, you can set up a video for success.  Like any other form of advertising, the title and the thumbnail have only a couple seconds to register someone’s interest before they move on to something else.

Social Media Outreach – a video has about 48 hours to profit from being on the “Most Watched” video page, so thinking ahead on ways to share it through outlets like Facebook, MySpace, Stumbleupon, and Digg can definitely provide a kick start.  However, the line between sharing a video with those who may be interested and outright spamming can be very thin indeed.

Which brings me to the below board elements of a viral video.  In his post on TechCrunch, Dan Ackerman Greenberg covers some of the points above, but also goes into ways how his firm artificially pumped up viewership through usage of multiple accounts and comment manipulation.  What is also interesting was his mea culpa follow up post after the blizzard of negative comments he received.

For a deeper understanding of YouTube and the sociology behind it, this video done by Dr. Michael Wesch of Kansas State University is both a fascinating story, as well as a great source of insights into YouTube itself:

Last week marked one year of posting at Insight Buzz. So after spending a couple minutes in Google Analytics looking over the 92 posts that made up this past year’s worth of writing, I’ve pulled together a list of the top couple of articles that had the most readership traffic in the past year.

1.)  10 Steps To Mastering Google Reader

10 steps to turning the torrents of blog feeds and news posts out there into a manageable flow of insights.  This is a topic I plan on coming back to again over the next several weeks.

2.) 4 Principles Of Persuasive Social Media Marketing

A study of the organizational influence work of psychologist Dr. Robert Cialdini in order to find corollaries in social media that lead to four principles for marketers looking for better success in social media marketing.

3.) Who Clicks on Ads?

A look into the 6% of the online population that makes up 50% of all display ad clicks.  And they’re probably not who you think they are.

In addition to the top posts, I’m also including a link to my first official post, on the potential behind search data as a source for consumer insights (numerically it is actually second, since my first post was the digital equivalent of someone tapping a microphone and asking “Is this on?”).

Consumer Insights And The Potential Of Search

How the study of search behavior from a cultural anthropologist’s standpoint will lead to even richer consumer insights for market researchers.

Former Forrester Research analyst Peter Kim has created a true labor of love with a list of 200+ examples of how companies and brands are levering social media marketing.

He captured a couple of my favorites that I’ve written about in the past, including Nike+, Carnival Cruise Lines, and Dove Evolution.

What is clear is that many brands and companies are trying innovative ways to tap into social media as a way to engage their consumers.

From his list I found this link to Blendtec’s YouTube channel, which as of this writing has had over 2 million channel views and over 100,000 subscribers.

Here is the latest iteration of “Will It Blend?”, featuring Nike: