Today's post is going to be one of the most controversial and opinionated posts I have ever written. Week 7 of the SMS module covers the benefits of Youtube. No discussion on strategic benefits of Youtube can be had without the mention of the phrase "going viral".
Since the time that Youtube launched, it has become a global behemoth for free video content on the web. There are several competitors that popped up over the years and have successfully drawn traffic away from Youtube, the latter remains the 'king of the hill'.
Nearly every video that has gone "viral" was from Youtube. In fact, the common phrase of "going viral" is implicitly associated with Youtube video. Viral videos have gone to make the careers of some, like pop artist Justin Bieber, while destroying others, like that of a Toronto lawyer who was caught on tape sucker punching a delirious cyclist who then ended up with criminal charges and went to jail because the Youtube video only showed the part him punching but did not show what altercation occurred prior that provoked the lawyer.
The question that every company and social media marketer wants to ask is what exactly makes a video go viral and if the steps can be replicated in order to benefit the company behind a viral video.
A search for the query "What makes a Youtube Video go viral" on Google resulted in 31,600,000 results! This clearly indicates how much is written about and studied on this topic.
A cursory review of some the top results suggests that there are indeed some proven methods to make a video go viral.
A whitepaper report prepared by Millward Brown (a brand management and marketing company) suggests these following factors for "going viral": Celebrities, Paid Media Support, Distinctiveness, Buzz-worthiness, Loud and Funny, Edgy, and Sexual Content.
The internet is abound by similar advice, all mostly from marketing companies that stand to benefit by having readers employ their services to do just what they recommend.
But it is not just businesses that have done in depth research on this subject. There are also various scholarly research papers on this subject. Thompkins (Seeding Viral Content
The Role of Message and Network Factors, 2012) suggests these three factors: Message Characteristics, Individual Sender or Receiver Characteristics, Social Network Characteristics.
While there may be compelling evidence to suggest there are elements to make a video go viral and possibility of identifying and replicating those techniques in other videos to increase likelihood of doing the same, it is my belief that the part that is evident but not spoken off or researched in to further are the elements of chance and luck!
The evidence in favor of identifiable and replicable techniques is based on the "See, I told you so" paradigm. As the saying goes, hindsight is 20/20. Most of the information is post-scriptum, viz. after the fact that a video has gone viral. It is easy to take any thing built or completed and then reverse engineer it and conclude that those core pieces comprise sum of the parts of the finished product.
What would rather help is research or development of a predictability tool than can foretell the probability of a style of video to go viral in the current moment. The online user sentiments are dynamic, so one video posted yesterday and gone viral may not have the same outcome if posted the day after tomorrow. This is the element of chance.
Furthermore, the part that requires a video going viral involves user participation. Since any given person on this earth is busy managing a multitude of tasks at any given time, it remains the truth that of all the gazillion videos posted the likelihood of several people sharing one video is remotely low. This is the element of luck where the stars are so well aligned towards one video that going viral is all but obvious.
This blog post does attribute some elements to the unpredictability and randomness factors for going viral. It remains to be seen how much of such factors can be quantifiable in order to make predictive analysis of "what is going to go viral" and simple click of a button!
-Abi
No comments:
Post a Comment