Is There a Way to Make a Video Go Viral?

First off, let me explain something: There is never a guarantee that a video that follows these steps exactly will go viral. But these tips will certainly help your chances of creating and sharing a viral video. In looking at the success this week of the viral videos in the Kansas University – Missouri University Border War, it’s obvious that an emotionally charged event like the upcoming last basketball games between 100-year college rivals is a good place to start. (Missouri plays host to the Jayhawks on Saturday night at Mizzou Arena, and the school is leaving the Big 12 for the SEC after this season.)

KU graduate Josh Dubois from Footage Productions, saw an opportunity and took advantage of it immediately. On Monday, a group of MU students posted a music video on YouTube called “We Are Mizzou,” that according to Yahoo! Sports, “was a lighthearted pro-Tigers, anti-Jayhawks rap anthem replete with trite lyrics, awkward dancing and lots and lots of Auto-Tune.”

Word spread quickly on Monday. According to the Kansas City Star, “the video has received a mixed reaction – as of Monday afternoon, it had 619 likes and 1,258 dislikes on YouTube, and comments for the video had been disabled.”

Dubois’ friend Jake Hills forwarded the “We Are Mizzou” video to him and suggested doing a response video. Dubois thought it was a joke. “I watched the first 30 seconds of it and honestly thought it was KU people dressed up in MU gear making fun of Mizzou. I was instantly fascinated with the fact that their video was really made viral by KU people sharing it.  It was pretty obvious this was happening because there were consistently double the dislikes as there were for likes on their video as I checked it all day, and they had comments disabled immediately — which is a terrible idea even if they are all bad comments.”

By 4pm the next day, Dubois, Hills, and Spencer Bergstrand had written, shot, edited, and uploaded the “We Are KU” video to YouTube.

I interviewed Dubois about his viral video strategy for “We Are KU” and this is what he had to say:

5 Elements for Viral Video Success

1. Ability to Shoot, Edit, and Upload Quickly – “I said we shoot tonight or tomorrow morning, this is on Tuesday, or we don’t do it at all. We have it edited the same day. I was even called by my buddy in Second City in LA as I was uploading the video because he was planning one with his Second City crew. I told him he was a bit late. Time of the day played a huge part too, but we were just lucky with that.  It was right at 4pm Central so everyone was wrapping up work and could watch (and share) a dumb video.

2. Timing – “Insanely important. We knew going in that we could probably even sacrifice a little story and a little of the comedy if it were released faster. Timing was just way more valuable than even those things and those things are really valuable. I don’t think we sacrificed too much in those areas because of how simple the idea was.”

3. Humor – “It needed to be funny and we didn’t have time to write and record a rap song. First, it was out of necessity in resources: I have even recorded about 15 rap songs in my life — no joke — but I knew we couldn’t do it.  It’s just like Gene Hackman in Enemy of the State: Use your weakness as an advantage! Only we were Will Smith, but in Fresh Prince gear.”

4. Length – Keep it Short! – “That is one of my only regrets. When I got home, I realized the high-five freeze-frame middle should have been the ending. It shouldn’t have been 2:30 even, but we got away with it. Theirs was like 5 minutes and I don’t think I ever even watched the whole thing. 1:30 would have been ideal for us.” (Ed. note – “We are Mizzou” is actually 3:34, even if it feels like 5 minutes.)

5. Aim at a Tech-savvy, Connected, Built-in Audience – “We released a picture of us on the bench just to friends and the response was hilarious. All our friends were very worried and super vocal about the fact that we could very easily make idiots of ourselves. We knew what they didn’t know though, which was that we were not about to rap. That fear built up quite a bit of anticipation in them which definitely helped fuel the immediate sharing. It was watched so many times so quickly that we initially broke the YouTube counter at 305 views.”

KU alum Mario Chalmers RTed the viral video link to his 438,000 followers the day the video was posted.

With all these things in place, Dubois had the perfect recipe for a viral video. Not long after the upload at 4pm Tuesday, things exploded.

“610 Sports and Nick Wright picked it up an hour and a half after it was uploaded which was awesome,” says Dubois. “He was probably responsible for the first and most important push. He talked about it on the radio when he was interviewing the guys from MU. Then the next big name was Mario Chalmers tweeting it to his 438,000 followers. We just retweeted and facebooked all the big-name stuff and that was our only involvement in promoting it after it launched. It then was picked up on KansasSports.net and Yahoo! Sports wrote an awesome article about it saying there has never been a more decisive victory in a video battle than this one. It was on Fox News in KC that night and then lots of big tweets the next couple days.  Yesterday I was contacted by ESPN about it.”

The “We Are KU” video as of 3pm Friday has 132,868 views, with 1,359 likes and 463 dislikes. The “We Are Mizzou” video as of 3pm Friday has 365,480 views, with 2,020 likes and 3,345 dislikes.

ESPN emailed Dubois asking for permission to use the video on both College Gameday and their site. It will be on their site for sure he said, but it might not be on Gameday now because the rights to the $10 stock music track in the background can’t transfer to ESPN. Yesterday, the big news was that the “We Are Mizzou” video would be performed on College Gameday, but it turns out that’s just a social media rumor.

To that, Dubois says, “I think it’s probably for the best. We have had a ton of good responses to our video from MU students and our other rivals K-State. By the way, I would happily challenge any of those bozos to rap battle any day of the week.”

Final Funny (Scary) Post Script: School rivalry runs deep, and people don’t like it when you make fun of them. (Always remember that anything social media is incredibly public.) Somebody contacted Dubois directly on Wednesday.

He explains: “I had my portfolio online with my phone number and so somebody called me the day after claiming to be my doctor. I knew it wasn’t my doctor though, because my doctor isn’t quite as homophobic.” The guy on the other end of the line was calling to let Dubois know that the test results were back — and he was HIV positive.

“I am not sure it was an MU fan, but one would only assume right? I don’t make people mad on a daily basis. I will say this, it’s incredibly hard to report a harassing phone call to the police. You can’t do it over the phone.”

You can “engage” all you want, but when you’re using social media for your company, make sure you are doing three things: Driving business, planning strategically, and measuring your success.

Last night in Wichita for the Social:IRL-sponsored talk (based on his new book) “No Bullshit Social Media Marketing,” Social Media Explorer‘s Jason Falls drove that point home again and again. Social media messages don’t have to be one thing or another, but they do have to hit what he calls the “relevancy bullseye” — the right message at the right time to the right audience.

I grabbed Jason after his presentation and asked him some of the most-often-asked questions by companies still unsure how to integrate social media into their marketing.

His answers are like his book: Straight and to the point. Check out this 7-minute interview with Jason Falls:

Customizing social media to fit your business goals is the next step after getting a thorough online brand audit. First, you have to see what’s out there about your company on the web. Then its time to identify opportunities. When you are putting together a social media strategy, Jason says you have to have clearly defined business goals. An objective statement can be your guide to good solid measurement of your success.

An objective statement has three elements:

• A target
• A deadline
• An expected level of attainment

This will help you PLAN TO MEASURE. If you don’t plan, you can’t measure — because you won’t know what you are measuring.

A couple quick sidenotes from Jason Falls during the Q&A portion of his talk:

1. WARNING: All social media research and statistics may not apply to your business. Don’t listen to “general research” about social media and think that it applies to everybody — it doesn’t. Just because somebody says online that the best time to post a blog is on the weekend because there’s less competition for eyeballs doesn’t necessarily mean that’s true for your market/vertical/business! The only thing that matters is your data. Keep track of tweets and shares for different times of the day and week yourself.

You need to do the work and put in the time yourself to see what works best for your company. Customize your social media program based on your data and your research, not someone else’s. All social media success is full of trial and error.

2. Google has always prided itself on not being evil, but Jason thinks they may have crossed the line and become evil. Google’s new search engine algorithm reportedly makes Twitter and Facebook less important in search and Google+ way more important.

3. Nonprofits are still challenged with raising money via social media. Jason said they shouldn’t just make it about spreading a message to as many people as you can. It’s more about the relevency bullseye: Get the right message to the right people at the right time. Make it personal and “focus the ask.” Social media doesn’t raise money, people do!

4. How Jason Falls manages social media channels: Twitter is quick and more personal, a good way to get a hold of him quickly. LinkedIn is where he gets a lot of leads. Sending blog links to Google+ is helping his web traffic immensely and allows longer conversations to happen. Facebook isn’t all that useful to him right now. It’s the place where people go when “they want to see what their friends are up to, but don’t want to talk to them.”

Occupy Wall Street is a social movement with optimistic dreams. A message fueled with passion catches on and spreads around the world. Sound familiar?

These days, people are doing more online than just sharing favorite family photos on Facebook, talking about their favorite snack recipe (mine is Chex® Apple Pie Snack Mix), or their favorite college football team (Go Badgers!)

Scroll below to see a 3D data visualization of the online spread of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

They are sharing their feelings and desires about the way our world should operate — and we all better be listening.

But sharing things through social media is all about “me,” right? Well, partly. You do have an opinion and that matters. Just ask the 50 million millennials who are expressing themselves online everyday and expecting us to be paying attention. And now, go to Zucotti Park in New York and ask the 10,000 people who are sharing the world stage to express their opinions about unemployment, ratio of worker compensation among CEOs, overall wealth disparity, and unhealthy relationships between Wall Street and K Street.

Although millennials certainly figure heavily in the Wall Street movement, it is not made up entirely of one generation. Said very well by Todd Essig in The Contrasting Psychologies of ‘Occupy Wall Street’ and the ‘Tea Party’:

“Everyone is included, everyone gets to have a say. Rather than policy, they have process. The “we” of OWS is worldwide, a globalized networked “we” full of good and bad existing simultaneously and everywhere. OWS inclusion carries with it a sadness that no repair is ever perfect, that even the most exceptional America possible will still and always fall short of our aspirational ideals. But it is paving the path to improvement that is critical, creating our individual yellow brick roads with an overwhelming sense of optimism, in the face of some rather disturbing economic concerns.”

In addition to the thousands of people around the world camping in parks to show their support of the Occupy Wall Street movement, #occupywallstreet (most widely used) and #ows hashtags are being included in social media tweets being sent and viewed around the world. Does it surprise you that of the thousands of web pages on the Internet talking about Occupy Wall Street since October 17 …

• 51% are on social media sites including Twitter, Google Plus, Facebook, etc.
• 20% are on video sites (thousands of videos being viewed of people attending, reporting on, and sharing their opinions about the movement)
• 18% are found on blogs
• < 20% of the data mentions New York (the movement is not secluded to one city or even one country)

But pay attention because millions are hearing the message…..

Can a movement from We the People (sound familiar?) really create change and catch on? See a 3D video visualization from the Spiral16 platform of the OWS message exploding beyond social media and people linking to the authors’ messages and adding their own opinions:

Occupy Wall Street continues to be successful because it isn’t a movement of people, it is the people. Despite our individual political views, it appears that the OWS movement, which is truly without one strong leader, may do what no political party has yet accomplished. Is that because of the social savvy of the population?  Is it because the concerns of the people have grown beyond any one demographic? According to Bill Maher, “These people down there, they’re not the counterculture. They’re the culture.”

Again I think of the millennials who, in the face of the toughest economic times since the Great Depression and despite the difficulty this generation has with finding a job when graduating, are major players in all of this. Add on top of that the optimism, time, energy, and social savvy of this vociferous generation and we all better pay attention. The message isn’t succinct, but it’s certainly spreading like wildfire (fueled with never-ending energy) — and the one thing they are in agreement on is that something is definitely wrong.

So for those readers who still doubt the strength of social media and its ability to support your business objectives, sit back and make a list of the passions your product or service bring out in your customers and employees.

Are you enabling those passions to be spread around to others?  Are you supporting causes that connect those passions to you?

Because if you are, you’ve just strengthened your voice to a worldwide audience who isn’t afraid to speak out about what matters to them.

Tracy Panko is the CEO of Spiral16.

Image Credit: Journalist Independent

Next week is the Pivot Conference 2011 in New York City and we couldn’t be more excited to go.

Pivot is an exclusive two-day event this coming Monday and Tuesday October 17-18. The conference is for top brand managers who seek to bridge the gap between their brand and the rising “social consumer.” Directed and hosted by Brian Solis, Pivot 2011 promises to deliver the context and understanding you need to redirect marketing dollars, create authentic interactions, and map a strategy of successful engagement with this powerful new market.

Spiral16 will be there as a Preferred Partner, selected by Solis as best-in-class in the category of web monitoring platforms. He and Pivot are using Spiral16 for a unique case study regarding the intersections of influence around Solis and key new social terms on the Internet.

Our Business Development Manager Robert Madison (@Robert_Spiral16) and Data Analytics Manager Aaron Weber (@dadsbigplan) will both be at #PivotCon, meeting people and sucking in knowledge left and right. If you want to start a conversation before Monday, hit these guys up online and pick their brains. Also, check out this impressive list of Pivot 2011 speakers. The full conference agenda is here.

It’s not too late to attend, and we can help a little on the cost: Click here to register for the conference and use the code Spiral20 to get 20% off your registration.

In the interview above, Brian explains that #PivotCon is designed for brands and their agencies, but with a focus on the consumer. Check out the video to see why Pivot is different from all the other social media conferences and how it will focus on solutions.

See you there!

Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance on Saturday Night Live has been big news this morning.  The Facebook founder dropped by SNL since Jesse Eisenberg was last night’s host.  Jesse Eisenberg played the role of the Facebook founder in The Social Network, which has been nominated for eight Oscars.

In the opening monologe, Jesse Eisenberg and Andy Sandberg banter about which one played Zuckerberg better, then the real Mark Zuckerberg comes on stage.

When Mark Zuckerberg met the actor who played him on film, Jesse Eisenberg told the Facebook founder that he “liked him on 60 Minutes” and then asked if he had seen The Social Network. Zuckerberg said that he had seen the film and that it was “interesting.”

Then Mark Zuckerberg introduced the musical guest and Eisenberg and Zuckerberg high-fived! Great move for Zuckerberg to come on and poke fun at himself.

Producer of The Social Network Scott Rudin said that dealing with Facebook during the development and making of film was a very time-consuming task since “Facebook was asserting that the movie wasn’t going to be truthful about founder Mark Zuckerberg.”

“Once it opened, they calmed down,” Rudin said of Facebook. “They went from feeling that we were going to be tough on Mark to feeling like we had made him look like a rock star.”

Mark Zuckerberg has made statements to the media that he was “impressed” with Jesse Eisenberg’s interpretation of him in The Social Network.

No matter what you think of his on-air performance, I think it’s a great move for Zuckerberg to come on Saturday Night Live and poke fun at himself.  If you didn’t see SNL last night, here’s a quick clip of the opening with Zuckerberg and Eisenberg:

Mark Zuckerberg was on stage for the end of the show as well as the beginning. Zuckerberg gives host Einsenberg a hug.  What did you think of Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance on SNL?

Photo: SNL/NBC

The powerful thing about 3D web visualization is that it allows you to understand the big picture at a glance. We’ve been following the Roy Blunt (R) – Robin Carnahan (D) political race for a Missouri U.S. seat with our web and social media monitoring platform to gain insight about the messages each candidate is communicating in the campaign. We created a video to illustrate how our visualization—called the Virtualization— is used.

How It Works

Our Virtualization tracks how messages are spread by visualizing web pages as green, red, or gray spheres. The data points assigned are those colors according to the sentiment of the page. The lines between them represent page links.

Using the timeline to watch them grow, we can compare and contrast influential posts/domains and identify authoritative voices driving the conversation.

Campaigning online is essential these days, and getting a big picture of your web presence can offer an entry point into your share of voice and help you draw conclusions. Watch the video as our data analytics manager Aaron Weber explores the relevant influencers in the Blunt – Carnahan political campaign and the connections between them.

Our ongoing partnership with local CBS affiliate KCTV5 has produced some interesting samples on recent newsworthy topics. This week, Spark monitored sentiment on the Internet regarding the recent launch of Motorola’s new Droid smartphone. Part of that sampling was used on KCTV5′s broadcast (video below).

After extending the Droid sampling through this past weekend, though, we were able to consider a larger date range and compare the launch of the Droid (on Nov. 6) to the launches of iPhone 3GS and Palm Pre earlier this summer.

Droid post-launch sentiment

What a difference a weekend can make. After continuing the sampling for four more days, positive sentiment jumped 10%, putting the Droid in between the Pre and iPhone 3GS in terms of positive sentiment.

Green is positive, red is negative, and gray is neutral sentiment. Neutral sentiment is scored when URLs have a balance in the language of both positive and negative sentiment or no overt sentiment at all. The breakdown for the Droid is as follows:

• Positive: 65.26%
• Neutral: 12.37%
• Negative: 22.37%

Palm Pre post-launch sentiment

• Positive: 67.08%
• Neutral: 11.04%
• Negative: 21.88%

This is the post-launch node-level sentiment chart for the iPhone 3GS (released June 19) from June 19 – July 3 (bottom chart). The large amount of negative sentiment is notable here:

• Positive: 58.46%
• Neutral: 8.85%
• Negative: 32.69%

This is a statistical sampling and the measurement dates for the iPhone 3GS and Palm Pre were slightly longer, but this data shows that the release of the Palm Pre had 1.82% more positive sentiment than the Droid, but that the Droid had 6.8% more positive sentiment than the iPhone 3GS.

iPhone 3GS post-launch sentiment

Influence
Spark uses a proprietary influence algorithm to determine which domain has the largest amount of influence in a particular insight. It is no surprise in the Droid sampling that Twitter is at number one, but it is interesting to note that YouTube is the second biggest site mentioning the Motorola Droid. Many of these URLs were video user reviews or function walk-thrus where users explained the features of the new phone.

Popular tech sites and Droid forums are also influential online. This sampling is from a larger data set, which spanned 11/2 – 11/16.

1. twitter.com
2. youtube.com
3. droidforums.net
4. news.cnet.com
5. phandroid.com
6. pcworld.com
7. engadget.com
8. phonesreview.co.uk
9. pcmag.com
10. geek.com

Below is the news report that aired on KCTV about the sampling, with data up to Nov. 11:

Last night Spiral16′s social media monitoring platform Spark was featured again on Kansas City CBS affiliate KCTV5.

This broadcast was part of the newscast’s Web Buzz segment hosted by Kurt Kloeben, who spotlighted some of the takeaways from a recent insight Spark ran on Kansas City Mayor Mark Funkhouser and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The week before, Kurt used Spark on KCTV5 to compare the sentiment of Kansas City Chiefs fans after weeks one and two of the NFL season.

Problems viewing this video? It is also available on our YouTube channel, Facebook page, and Flickr account.

We gave a presentation at the Kansas City Direct Marketing Association luncheon on Tuesday at Figlio Tower. It’s a basic introduction to social media and the many ways to measure the metrics associated with it. We’d love to hear feedback, so please leave your thoughts in the comments!

On Wednesday evening, Kansas City CBS affiliate KCTV5 featured Spiral16 as part of their regular segment on technology and social media.

Problems viewing this video? It is also available on our YouTube channel, Facebook page, and Flickr account.

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