The term “Viral marketing” refers to how people pass on and share interesting and entertaining content via the internet. Viral commercials often take the form of funny video clips, or interactive Flash games, an advergame, images, and even text. It’s been noted that viral marketing is popular because of the ease of executing a marketing campaign, relative low-cost (in comparison to direct mail), excellent and precise targeting that leads to the high and rapid response rate. The main strength of viral marketing is its ability to obtain a large number of interested people at low cost. Through the use of the internet and the effects of e-mail or internet advertising, the business-to-customer efforts have a greater impact than many other tools of marketing.
Viral marketing is a technique that avoids the annoyance of spam mail. This in turn encourages users to tell a friend of a particular product or services, which serves as highly effective word-of mouth advertising.
Researchers are convinced that this concept is a viable and effective marketing tool. There’s proof to backup their claims. Apparently the brain makes decisions in just a 20th of a second of viewing a webpage, confirms a study, published in the journal Behavior and Information. According to statistics, recreational Internet surfing has overtaken television as the largest recreational activity. Apparently, by the end of this year (2006) it is estimated that more than 6 billion people will be using the internet. Note that it took more than 50 years for television to get to this point. It’s certainly an innovative medium that has captured the interest of the person searching for answers behind a PC, and the individual hoping to score with a marketing strategy.
YouTube and other distribution channels
One the greatest ‘vessels’ of the viral marketing concept is without a doubt YouTube, a popular free video sharing website that utilizes AdobeFlash technology to display video and allows users to upload, view, and share video clips.
After one year in business, YouTube were acquired for approximately $1.65 (approximately 0.49252 Euros) by Google. Starting from zero about a year ago (February 2005, to be exact). YouTube is now receiving more traffic than MySpace, CNN.com, and Ebay combined. This is certainly a testament to the growth of video and its viral nature. The wide variety of site content includes movie, television clips and movie videos, as well as amateur content such as video blogging. The company was named TIME magazine’s “Invention of the Year” for 2006. In October 2006, Google Inc. announced that it had reached a deal to acquire the company for $1.65 billion USD in Google's stock.
As for Viral Marketing, YouTube has been hailed the advertising medium of the future. Thanks to viral videos…
Viral Video
According to Wikipedia (the free encyclopedia), viral video is video clip content which gains widespread popularity through the process of the Internet shared typically through email or IM messages, blogs and other media sharing websites. Viral videos are often humorous in nature and may range from televised comedy. There are millions of short video clips on the web, produced by amateurs and professionals. The amateurs publish videos for fun and professional publish their clips in order to drive traffic to their websites and to sell more of their products or services.
With the introduction of the latest camera phones technology, this means that many videos shot these days are shot by consumers on these devices hassle free fun. Cheap video editing and publishing tools allow video shot on mobile phones to be edited and distributed virally both on the web by email and between phones by Bluetooth.
How effective are viral videos at driving traffic to web sites?
Video clips are used to generate click-throughs and subscriptions. Videos ranging in length and promotional content placed on YouTube and Google Video for example. The Video specifies a URL, indicating that there’s a website that may be interesting or relevant to the viewer. A link is also provided on the same page as the video, which potentially drives traffic back to the main website. Videos can be sorted into various categories such as Personal Blog (global issues, spirituality, current events) and Comedy (spoofs, skits, celebrity parody), to mention but a few.
The intention is not to produce a professional looking video that you’d expect from an advertising agency, instead in many instances, video clips are shot in an "amateurish" way and carries though a very ‘unprofessional’ image in their approach and production. This is done deliberately as a professional image would most definitely inhibit the viral potential of videos, and set the video s apart from the ‘ordinary’ videos created by individuals on the web. A point worth mentioning is the fact that although promotional, viral videos normally do not contain a sales message, product placement or a sales pitch on a landing page.
Note that entertaining or provocative videos can quickly become viral, being shared by tens or even hundreds of thousands of viewers, most of them connected through online social networks. 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 or 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 and blogs for the major search engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN, you also have to optimize the presentation of your video clips in order to be found through searches within social network community sites.
This process is called Social Media Optimization, or SMO. SMO entails optimising your online presence to become more visible through searches with online communities and community web sites. This process is very similar to SEO for social network sites. SMO allows you to create more visible sites, videos, podcasts, RSS feeds and blog entries which will be more searchable to tens of millions of people who are connected through sites like MySpace, YouTube, Del.icious, Technorati, Reddit, Facebook and dozens of others.
The essence of SMO is to increase the chances of your video or any other portable, sharable content from 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 maximise the chances of your video going viral, you have to optimise it for sharing across social network communities.
When you post a video clip to your blog, you will want to increase the chances of the video being widely distributed, correct? Well, the most basic step to take is to add a line of links to relevant social network sites.
Here is an example of a typical list of links at the end of an optimized blog entry:(Add to: YouTube blinklist del.cio.us digg yahoo! furl)These links allow people to quickly add your blog entry to the social network or community site or sites to which they belong. Once the post has been added by it will be available to every other member of that community through the site's search function.
While some of these sites, like del.icious, Yahoo! and furl include categories that cover almost any topic and subject you can think of, other communities are more focused.
YouTube is clearly focused on short videos. In common with other social network sites, it has a number of features that enable members to vote for, rate, share and distribute the videos they like best. The voting and rating process is an integral part of almost all social network community sites. As a result, content rises to the surface through a "democratic" process, whereby the combined opinions of community members determine which content gets the greatest exposure. Social media search is driven by popular vote. It is essential to understand this when you create your own videos. Needless to say, your videos need to be compelling, entertaining or at least different.
There are few essential tips to keep in mind when maximising the viral potential of your video…
Ensure that your video has interesting, entertaining or provocative content. If it doesn't engage your audience then they will have little incentive to share it with other people they know, or across their social networks.
Be very cautious about including commercial or promotional content. Less is certainly more in this medium. Try not to bombard your viewer with too many pay-off lines and advertising hogwash – keep it as ‘real’ as possible. The most powerful short videos are those which are purely entertaining-a short catchy and relevant phrase that the consumer relates to will suffice.
Don’t settle for creating just one video. You can’t accurately predict which videos will enjoy wide, viral distribution. Plan on creating a series of clips, and learn from the one which performs the best.
Optimise your video clips to maximise distribution across social network sites. Use tags and bookmarking links to help people find, save and share your videos.
Submitted by Jasmine.
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