Four steps to making an effective viral video

"Instead of interrupting the viewer's entertainment experience with ads, the ads are the entertainment."

Is viral video marketing a one size fits all?

Let viral video clips drive targeted traffic.
There are millions of short video clips on the web, produced by professionals and amateurs. The amateurs publish their video clips for fun and notoriety, and the professionals produce and publish them in order to drive traffic to their web sites or sell more products or services.
Tens of millions of people watch viral videos, but the question for marketers is how effective are they driving qualified traffic for the sake of their own marketing objectives and goals.

Look at the evolution from where the Internet first started. It started out with everything being free. Natural search was first starting. You could actually go to the top of a natural search engine within a day or two of launching a site and start getting traffic almost immediately.

Viral marketing is now one of the most powerful ways to market online. This is what the Internet was designed for, multimedia as mainstream. This has come about primarily because of the adoption of broadband.
Depending on the report about 50% of the houses in the U.S. have broadband, and that trend is continuing across the world. 80% to 90% of businesses are now using broadband.


Given the truth of viral development of online social community, one key question that marketers should still keep in mind is that: before thinking of launching any viral video campaign, it is important to get deeper knowledge of online surfing audience, examine your potential customers’ demographic, psychological and behavior characteristics, and question yourself whether your customers match the audience. Viral videos have a broad application in marketing, however, we cannot conclude that it is a one size fits all tool.

Production: Make your viral videos attractive and effective from the starting point.

A good viral video production needs careful design and execution. Look at what relative topics are popular in the online community might help understand your audience and create a superstar video for your products.

Pre-production: It’s all about a story
Before starting to shoot the video, a copy telling the story or the theme for the video is important. Entertaining and relativity to audience’s interest is the key. Remember the fact that the online audience’ attention is precious but easy to switch to the abundant of online information sea. So make sure to keep your video clips short, preferable under five minutes. Make it interesting, entertaining or provocative. And be cautious of commercial content. The most powerful short videos are those entertaining while communicating brand awareness and promotion without interruption and annoyance.

Make people feel something
The most important trick of all is to create a very strong emotion. You need to have an opinion, to express an idea with commitment and dedication. You want people to:
be filled with love or hate;
be very happy or insanely angry;
be an idiot or a genius;
be deeply compassionate or an egoistic bitch
You want people's blood to be pumping of excitement.
Forget neutral, trying to please everyone, supporting several target groups or any of the many ways to be unbiased. Viral marketing is 100% about emotions.

Do something unexpected
If you want people to notice your campaign, you have to do something different - something unexpected. Forget about trying to promote your products as just being great - everybody does that. Forget about trying to make it look cool - everyone else has "been there, done that". And above all, never be a copycat.


Do not try to make advertisements
One of the biggest mistake companies make is when they think viral marketing is just advertisements that people share - it is not. Traditional marketing is about promoting your product, showing how good it is, giving it center stage - and generally being incredibly selfish (and possibly using supermodels or movie stars). But guess what, nobody cares about you!

Viral marketing is all about a good story.
When BMW put out BMW Films, the main ingredient was not the cars, but the story. Replace the car with another one, and it would still be great. When Sony made their Bravia TV ads, the product was not even seen - yet everyone remembers it.

Forget about you, your product or your company. Focus exclusively in creating a good and interesting story. Sure, you can add your product into the mix, but it must not be the most important thing.

Production: media technology
Ask good video management softwares for help. You don’t have to be professional, but a good application of animation, title insert, color, music and expected format all makes a great viral video.

Post-production: add more value to your video
Make sequels: Never leave people standing with nothing.
People have just seen your campaign. They think it was interesting, unexpected and their emotions has reached a high level - you have their complete attention. If you simply do nothing to follow it, you lose a big opportunity to be a super sales star. When you got people's attention you need to act, and one of the best ways of doing that is to give them more - make sequels. It can be extra movies similar in concept to the first one - like BMW Films and Nissan did. It can be a behind the scenes look Bloopers; A blog about the process (like Nissan did); Extra material, goodies etc.

One more thing: forget about countdown releases. People's attention span does not last that long. Give them everything now!
Allow Sharing, downloading and embedding.

Sharing is what viral marketing is all about. Everything you do to make that easier is going to improve your campaign. That means that you need to allow people to: Download the content, in a usable format (videos in MPG, pictures in JPG etc.) Allowing them to easily embed the content on their own sites (Note: remember bandwidth issues). Sending it to friends, either using a link or by sending the content directly. Publishing it on various social networks - Digg, YouTube etc. Allow people to add it in the bookmarking sites

Note: This is also easily overdone. You do not want to clutter up your page with a zillion "share me, dig this etc." icons.
Connect with comments.

Another important element is to connect with your audience. Remember you got their attention, they are excited and now they want to talk. Comments are the most effective way to do this.

Keep in mind that the best viral marketing campaign is one that creates a strong emotion. This means some people will really like it - while others will get very angry. You have to accept both in your comments, and you have to welcome both opinions. But at the same time you must prevent individuals from waging war against each other.

It is not a sin to delete comments from people who attack another person, or if the comment is off-topic. But it is a sin to delete comments from people who just have an negative opinion.

And most importantly. Connecting with people through comments means talking back. Do not add comments if you do not want to participate yourself.

Never restrict access! Viral marketing is also about your campaign getting a life on its own - spreading like a virus. To become "viral", it needs to be free. Never add restrictions to the mix. Do not require people to register to become members, to download special software, to enter "unlock" codes or to do something in order to get the right link. Viral marketing is never about exclusivity. It is about getting it out there for everyone to see.

Strategic distribution

Video as a component of your social media optimization strategy
Entertaining or provocative videos can quickly become viral, being shared by millions of viewers, however, it is important to understand the nature of the environment in which video clips are most widely distributed and shared.

If you simply add a video clip to your site, blog and to YouTube, you will be taking advantage of only a small fraction of the opportunity that exists. In the same way that you optimize your web sites for the major search engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN, you also have to optimize the presentation of your videos in order to rank at the top through searches within social network community sites. This process is called Social Media Optimization, or SMO.

Social Media Optimization is the process by which you optimize your online presence to be more visible through searches within online communities and community web sites. It is like SEO (search engine optimization) for social network sites. It is how you make your sites, videos, podcasts, RSS feeds and blog entries more visible and searchable to tens of millions of people who are connected through sites like MySpace, YouTube, Del.icious, Technorati, Reddit, Facebook and dozens of others.

Traditional "connectors" for static sites comprise linking strategies and search engine marketing. Social network "connectors" include use of blogs, podcasts, bookmarks, tags, RSS feeds, trackbacks, reviews, comments, ratings and participation in networked community groups.
The essence of SMO is to increase the chances of your video - or any other portable, sharable content – being distributed more widely and being found more quickly though community search engines.
This is important when producing short videos, because it is within and across these networked community sites that video clips are most likely to be distributed and shared. In other words, to maximize the chances of your video going viral, you have to optimize it for sharing across social network communities.

Measurement
Paid search nowadays has emerged and Natural Search has become extremely competitive. ROI has become much more important. People stopped offering everything free, and marketers' expectations about potential performance rose dramatically as they recognized the potential.
Now, we are in an era where search - paid search and natural search - is a commodity. If you are not doing it well, you must improve quickly. ROI is driving the marketing. Nothing is free. The war on SPAM is waged daily, and the legislative environment is changing daily.

Using YouTube and Google Video to publish a series of short videos, we can measure the number of times they were viewed, the ranking or rating of the viral video, how many clickthoughs were generated, and how many site visitors converted to subscribers, etc.

Based on a iProspect research result, which is responded by online search marketers, it is known that the online search to offline purchase conversion rate is still high. This study found out that, in a vertical market (consumer electronics and computers), 92% of conversions that took place as a result of online research performed via a search engine, took place offline, with only 7% took place online. As a result, it is also important for marketers to measure viral marketing effect to meet main business goals, like marketing ROI, viral video clickthrough to real online/offline purchase ratio, etc.