“We want to go VIRAL with this video but without infecting other people’s computers. Can you please do it ASAP? Thx.”
– An employer’s not-so-realistic demand for a web designer, as seen on ClientsFromHell.
I spent a long time writing a blog post of epic proportions on how articles like “Six Simple Steps to Viral Marketing” and “The Viral Marketing Cheat Sheet” drive me insane before realizing that all I need to say is this: you don’t need to be a “viral marketing expert” to realize web content goes viral because it offers something new or different, not because it followed some set procedure.
A lot of these go-viral-in-just-5-easy-steps type articles seem to focus on reaching the audiences of social media users with high “social networking potential”, which seems like a fair enough tip, but why the focus on convincing them to talk about your product when you could just collaborate with them directly? As it turns out, even web content creators with huge audiences don’t cost as much to work with as Brad Pitt (maybe someone should have told Chanel that before they spent $7 million on this). Here are a couple of companies that I think have managed to do that.
Lonely Planet with Natalie Tran (communitychannel on YouTube)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_348851&feature=iv&src_vid=gXWXiRB838I&v=GKr7-S6eDXY
When the world’s largest travel guide book wanted to reach a younger audience, they sent the most subscribed-to Australian YouTuber, Natalie Tran, around the world. Sure, sending someone around the world isn’t cheap, but they gained access to Tran’s 1,000,000+ subscribers. Additionally, they didn’t to worry about any of the creative work as it was all in the hands of someone who has over 150 YouTube videos with over a million views (going up to 34 million views) at little to no production cost. It makes me think a bit about how come more marketers aren’t working with these people. It mostly just makes me jealous that Tran got paid to travel around the world, though.
King of the Web is arguably past its prime, but the attention it gathered when it was big was dumbfounding. KotW held contests where online content creators (mostly YouTubers) could compete with each other for prizes of $10,000 (this has since decreased). The content creators, a lot of whom were campaigning for votes so that they could donate the prize money to charity, brought approximately 25,000,000 subscribers worldwide to visit and vote on KotW’s site (which monetized by charging users who really wanted their favourite creator to win for “voting bonuses”). KotW didn’t turn out to be very sustainable, but it certainly made a point about the power of motivating content creators.
I can think of quite a few other examples (Netflix with Philip DeFranco, indie gaming companies like Mojang with “let’s play-ers”, and the YouTube Partnership program as a whole), but for brevity’s sake, I’ll pass on discussing them in depth. If anyone happens by this post and can think of any others, however, I’d love to hear about them.