You can’t create viral

Image via CrunchBase

Two things prompted this blog. The first was the news that the Gangnam Style video had overtaken Justin Bieber as the most viewed post on YouTube. The second was when I took a brief that included the dreaded phrase “they want something viral.”

The news about Gangnam Style pleased me a little bit. After all, I’m one of the first to celebrate when the Bieber gets taken down a peg or two – anyone who displays this level of stupidity deserves everything they get in my book.

But the triumph of Gangnam Style also showed why the brief I took was asking the impossible. If, six months ago, you’d asked anybody what would come out on top in a battle between a video by the biggest teen heartthrob on the planet or one by an obscure South Korean rapper, I’m pretty sure I know what the answer would have been. And, personally I still can’t see why Psy’s annoying tune has become so popular. But obviously 805 million viewers see it differently.

And that’s the point about virality. It’s all down to personal taste. Which is why nobody can predict it. Yes, you can study the form – what’s become popular and what hasn’t. You can make something you think is bound to go viral. And you can market it as much as you want. But there’s no secret formula you can follow.

For example, some of the most popular YouTube videos have been completely spontaneous (Fenton anyone?). But there are millions of other spontaneous videos on YouTube that languish with just a few views. And there’s no rhyme or reason to it.

So, clients – please don’t ask your creative team to come up with something ‘viral’. Because ultimately, you’ll all be on a hiding to nothing.

When is a video not a video?

Video is one of the best ways to engage your audience online. Yes, it’s a bit expensive to put together, but when it’s done even moderately well, it can engage, educate and entertain visitors to your site better than anything else. And when we develop a careers website for our clients – particularly for the graduate market – we always encourage them to use video, if possible.

So, when I discovered recently that one of our clients had created five profile videos of people who’d been through their graduate schemes, talking about their experiences, you’d have thought I’d have been pleased. But, no. Because, although, as their agency, we designed and built their graduate careers website and helped them to develop a Facebook page, they didn’t tell us they were making these videos.

That, in itself, isn’t such a major fail. After all, the content was there, uploaded to their YouTube channel, so people were watching it, right?

Wrong.

Although they’d uploaded the videos to YouTube, the client decided not to promote them. In fact, the videos lay dormant on the YouTube channel for over a month before they decided to put a link to one of them on Facebook.

So these expensively produced videos weren’t advertised, promoted or highlighted in any way. For a month. Now we know of their existence, of course, we’re recommending a strategy to get the right people watching them and finding out more about the graduate programmes. But it all could have been done far sooner.

So for me, the question posed in the headline is like the old philosophical conundrum about the tree falling in the forest and whether it makes a sound if there’s nobody there to hear it. In these days when social is the name of the game, a video is not a video when you don’t tell anybody how to find it.