郴州卓尔医疗:The Secret Strategies Behind Many "Viral" Videos

This guest post was written by Dan Ackerman Greenberg, co-founder of viral video marketing company The Comotion Group and lead TA for the Stanford Facebook Class. Dan will graduate from the Stanford Management Science & Engineering Masters program in June.

Have you ever watched a video with 100,000 views on YouTube andthought to yourself: “How the hell did that video get so many views?”Chances are pretty good that this didn’t happen naturally, but ratherthat some company worked hard to make it happen – some company likemine.

When most people talk about “viral videos,” they’re usually referring to videos like Miss Teen South Carolina, Smirnoff’s Tea Partay music video, the Sony Bravia ads, Soulja Boy– videos that have traveled all around the internet and been posted onYouTube, MySpace, Google Video, Facebook, Digg, blogs, etc. – videoswith millions and millions of views.

Over the past year, I have run clandestine marketing campaigns meantto ensure that promotional videos become truly viral, as these exampleshave become in the extreme. In this post, I will share some of thetechniques I use to do my job: to get at least 100,000 people to watchmy clients’ “viral” videos.

Secret #1: Not all viral videos are what they seem

There are tens of thousands of videos uploaded to YouTube each day(I’ve heard estimates between 10-65,000 videos per day). I don’t carehow “viral” you think your video is; no one is going to find it and noone is going to watch it.

The members of my startup are hired guns – our clients give us videosand we make them go viral. Our rule of thumb is that if we don’t get avideo 100,000 views, we don’t charge.

So far, we’ve worked on 80-90 videos and we’ve seen overwhelmingsuccess. In the past 3 months, we’ve achieved over 20 million views forour clients, with videos ranging from 100,000 views to upwards of 1.5million views each. In other words, not all videos go viral organically –there is a method to the madness.

I can’t reveal our clients’ names and I can’t link to the videoswe’ve worked on, because YouTube surely doesn’t like what we’re doingand our clients hate to admit that they need professional help withtheir “viral” videos. But I can give you a general idea of who we’veworked with: two top Hollywood movie studios, a major record label, avariety of very well known consumer brands, and a number of differentstartups, both domestic and international.

This summer, we were approached by a Hollywood movie studio and askedto help market a series of viral clips they had created in advance of ablockbuster. The videos were 10-20 seconds each, were shot from whatappeared to be a camera phone, and captured a series of unexpected andshocking events that required professional post-production and CGI.Needless to say, the studio had invested a significant amount of moneyin creating the videos but every time they put them online, theycouldn’t get more than a few thousand views.

We took six videos and achieved:

• 6 million views on YouTube
• ~30,000 ratings
• ~10,000 favorites
• ~10,000 comments
• 200+ blog posts linking back to the videos
• All six videos made it into the top 5 Most Viewed of the Day, and the two that went truly viral (1.5 million views each) were #1 and #2 Most Viewed of the Week.

The following principles were the secrets to our success.

2. Content is NOT King

If you want a truly viral video that will get millions of people towatch and share it, then yes, content is key. But good content is notnecessary to get 100,000 views if you follow these strategies.

Don’t get me wrong: the content is what will drive visitors back to asite. So a video must have a decent concept, but one shouldn’t agonizeover determining the best “viral” video possible. Generally, a conceptshould not be forced because it fits a brand. Rather, a brand should befit into a great concept. Here are some guidelines we follow:

• Make it short: 15-30 seconds is ideal; break down long stories into bite-sized clips
• Design for remixing: create a video that is simple enough to be remixed over and over again by others. Ex: “Dramatic Hamster”
• Don’t make an outright ad: if a video feels like an ad, viewers won’t share it unless it’s really amazing. Ex: Sony Bravia
• Make it shocking: give a viewer no choice but to investigate further. Ex: “UFO Haiti”
• Use fake headlines: make the viewer say, “Holy shit, did that actually happen?!” Ex: “Stolen Nascar”
• Appeal to sex: if all else fails, hire the most attractive women available to be in the video. Ex: “Yoga 4 Dudes”

These recent videos would have been perfect had they been viral “ads” pointing people back to websites:

• Model Falls in Hole on Runway
• Cheerleader Gets Run Over By Football Team
• PacMan: The Chase
• Dude
• Dog Drives Car
• Snowball – Dancing Cockatoo

3. Core Strategy: Getting onto the “Most Viewed” page

Now that a video is ready to go, how the hell is it going to attract 100,000 viewers?

The core concept of video marketing on YouTube is to harness thepower of the site’s traffic. Here’s the idea: something like 80 millionvideos are watched each day on YouTube, and a significant number ofthose views come from people clicking the “Videos” tab at the top. Thegoal is to get a video on that Videos page, which lists the Daily MostViewed videos.

If we succeed, the video will no longer be a single needle in thehaystack of 10,000 new videos per day. It will be one of the twentyvideos on the Most Viewed page, which means that we can grab 1/20th ofthe clicks on that page! And the higher up on the page our video is,the more views we are going to get.

So how do we get the first 50,000 views we need to get our videos onto the Most Viewed list?

• Blogs: We reach out to individuals who run relevant blogs and actually pay them to post our embedded videos. Sounds a little bit like cheating/PayPerPost, but it’s effective and it’s not against any rules.
• Forums: We start new threads and embed our videos. Sometimes, this means kickstarting the conversations by setting up multiple accounts on each forum and posting back and forth between a few different users. Yes, it’s tedious and time-consuming, but if we get enough people working on it, it can have a tremendous effect.
• MySpace: Plenty of users allow you to embed YouTube videos right in the comments section of their MySpace pages. We take advantage of this.
• Facebook: Share, share, share. We’ve taken Dave McClure’s advice and built a sizeable presence on Facebook, so sharing a video with our entire friends list can have a real impact. Other ideas include creating an event that announces the video launch and inviting friends, writing a note and tagging friends, or posting the video on Facebook Video with a link back to the original YouTube video.
• Email lists: Send the video to an email list. Depending on the size of the list (and the recipients’ willingness to receive links to YouTube videos), this can be a very effective strategy.
• Friends: Make sure everyone we know watches the video and try to get them to email it out to their friends, or at least share it on Facebook.

Each video has a shelf life of 48 hours before it’s moved from theDaily Most Viewed list to the Weekly Most Viewed list, so it’s importantthat this happens quickly. As I mentioned before, when done right,this is a tremendously successful strategy.

4. Title Optimization

Once a video is on the Most Viewed page, what can be done to maximize views?

It seems obvious, but people see hundreds of videos on YouTube, andthe title and thumbnail are an easy way for video publishers to activelypersuade someone to click on a video. Titles can be changed a limitlessnumber of times, so we sometimes have a catchy (and somewhatmisleading) title for the first few days, then later switch to somethingmore relevant to the brand. Recently, I’ve noticed a trend towardstitling videos with the phrases “exclusive,” “behind the scenes,” and“leaked video.”

5. Thumbnail Optimization

If a video is sitting on the Most Viewed page with nineteen othervideos, a compelling video thumbnail is the single best strategy tomaximize the number of clicks the video gets.

YouTube provides three choices for a video’s thumbnail, one of whichis grabbed from the exact middle of the video. As we edit our videos,we make sure that the frame at the very middle is interesting. It’s nosurprise that videos with thumbnails of half naked women get hundreds ofthousands of views. Not to say that this is the best strategy, but youget the idea. Two rules of thumb: the thumbnail should be clear(suggesting high video quality) and ideally it should have a face or atleast a person in it.

Also, when we feel particularly creative, we optimize all threethumbnails then change the thumbnail every few hours. This is definitelyan underused strategy, but it’s an interesting way to keep a videofresh once it’s on the Most Viewed list.

See the highlighted videos in the screenshot below for a good exampleof how a compelling title and screenshot can make all the differenceonce the video is on the Most Viewed page.

6. Commenting: Having a conversation with yourself

Every power user on YouTube has a number of different accounts. Sodo we. A great way to maximize the number of people who watch ourvideos is to create some sort of controversy in the comments sectionbelow the video. We get a few people in our office to log in throughoutthe day and post heated comments back and forth (you can definitelyhave a lot of fun with this). Everyone loves a good, heated discussionin the comments section – especially if the comments are related to abrand/startup.

Also, we aren’t afraid to delete comments – if someone is saying ourvideo (or your startup) sucks, we just delete their comment. We can’tlet one user’s negativity taint everyone else’s opinions.

We usually get one comment for every thousand views, since mostpeople watching YouTube videos aren’t logged in. But a heated commentthread (done well) will engage viewers and will drive traffic back toour sites.

7. Releasing all videos simultaneously

Once people are watching a video, how do we keep them engaged and bring them back to a website?

A lot of the time our clients say: “We’ve got 5 videos and we’regoing to release one every few days so that viewers look forward to eachvideo.”

This is the wrong way to think about YouTube marketing. If we havemultiple videos, we post all of them at once. If someone sees our firstvideo and is so intrigued that they want to watch more, why would wemake them wait until we post the next one? We give them everything upfront. If a user wants to watch all five of our videos right now,there’s a much better chance that we’ll be able to persuade them toclick through to our website. We don’t make them wait after seeing thefirst video, because they’re never going to see the next four.

Once our first video is done, we delete our second video thenre-upload it. Now we have another 48-hour window to push it to the MostViewed page. Rinse and repeat. Using this strategy, we give our mostinterested viewers the chance to fully engage with a campaign withoutcompromising the opportunity to individually release and market eachconsecutive video.

8. Strategic Tagging: Leading viewers down the rabbit hole

This is one of my favorite strategies and one that I think weinvented. YouTube allows you to tag your videos with keywords that makeyour videos show up in relevant searches. For the first week that ourvideo is online, we don’t use keyword tags to optimize the video forsearches on YouTube. Instead, we’ve discovered that you can use tags tocontrol the videos that show up in the Related Videos box.

I like to think about it as leading viewers down the rabbit hole. Theidea here is to make it as easy as possible for viewers to engage withall your content, rather than jumping away to “related” content thatactually has nothing to do with your brand/startup.

So how do we strategically tag? We choose three or four unique tagsand use only these tags for all of the videos we post. I’m not talkingabout obscure tags; I’m talking about unique tags, tags that are notused by any other YouTube videos. Done correctly, this will allow us tohave full control over the videos that show up as “Related Videos.”

When views start trailing off after a few days to a week, it’s timeto add some more generic tags, tags that draw out the long tail of avideo as it starts to appear in search results on YouTube and Google.

9. Metrics/Tracking: How we measure effectiveness

The following is how we measure the success of our viral videos.

For one, we tweak the links put up on YouTube (whether in a YouTubechannel or in a video description) by adding “?video=1” to the end ofeach URL. This makes it much easier to track inbound links using GoogleAnalytics or another metrics tool.

TubeMogul and VidMetrixalso track views/comments/ratings on each individual video and draw outnice graphs that can be shared with the team. Additionally, thesetools follow the viral spread of a video outside of YouTube andthroughout other social media sites and blogs.

Conclusion

The Wild West days of Lonely Girl and Ask A Ninja are over. Yousimply can’t expect to post great videos on YouTube and have them goviral on their own, even if you think you have the best videos ever.These days, achieving true virality takes serious creativity, some luck,and a lot of hard work. So, my advice: fire your PR firm and do ityourself.