Day 2 of SES San Jose started off nicely with Igniting Viral Campaigns. Our own Greg Finn was on the panel along with four(!) other speakers, which I think is two too many. Everyone was limited to about 10 minutes of speaking time, and I think it was just too much information for an audience to digest. There’s a reason why three is the magic number, people.

Anyway, I may be biased but I thought that Greg had the best presentation along with Matthew Liu from YouTube. They both gave direct, actionable advice and focused more on how-to’s than general overviews and case studies. I’ve recapped the session below and highlighted some of the biggest takeaways.

Bill Leake, Apogee Search

Bill talked about how ad agencies don’t like spending media dollars to drive people into content they didn’t create, whereas PR firms are the opposite, and that it’s important to bridge that gap and get the most out of viral marketing. He shared a case study about Office Depot adding consumer generated reviews to their website in 2008 and incorporating consumer generated review-related terms into their paid search advertising campaigns. Their efforts were met with great success. He also suggested having a main SEM campaign and creating a second or third campaign around blog posts or user reviews.

Important Takeaways:

• User reviews give your business a lot of credibility
• When viral growth takes off, it takes off fast, but it’s like a reverse long tail in that it takes some effort to get going

Greg Finn, Representin’ 10e20 Like a Champ

Greg blew through his slide deck because he had so much information to cover, but his presentation was full of great tips and pointers that I’ve highlighted below:

Angles to take to maximize viral potential:

• Humor
• Educational resources
• Lists
• Breaking information

What to do before launching a viral campaign:

• Make sure there’s proper formatting
• Make sure the content is easy to consume
• Be sure the content is very visual
• Look for a social tone

Mediums for success:

• Utilize popular destinations — submit great content to sites like FunnyorDie, Break, Ebaum’s World, YouTube, Flickr, etc.
• Check out social news sites
  • They’re the largest source for igniting your campaigns
  • Be as “non-corporate” as possible — social news users generally don’t respond favorably to a strong or obvious corporate presence
  • Make sure you’re part of the community before trying to participate — each audience can be slightly different, so it’s important to know how each community works before engaging with them
  • Check out sites like Digg (it’s not just for video games and gadgets; there are a lot of different categories), StumbleUpon (a great resource for all sorts of viral content; use appropriate, niche categories), Reddit (use subreddits for the best success rate), Propeller, Mixx, Plime, etc.

Social Networking

• Don’t just use social networking to promote your corporate brand; helping the community is better than helping yourself
• Create non-corporate pages on Facebook and leverage the entire audience rather than limiting your appeal (e.g., create a fan page for Girls Who Can Use Power Tools instead of a fan page for Black and Decker)

Twitter

• Make it easy to tweet your content and allow for easy retweets
• Promote things via Twitter during peak hours
• Engage with your followers and make them feel appreciated

Matthew Liu, Product Manager for YouTube

Sometimes viral videos just “happen”. Some people upload a video without any marketing involved, and it just happens to take off and become wildly successful. If you manage to accidentally catch “lightning in a bottle,” you can try to take advantage of the virality after the fact.

You can also promote viral videos through “free” marketing, such as guerrilla marketing:

• Use subtle branding and stealth marketing efforts
• Seed to news sites and blogs
• Use YouTube, Twitter and Facebook to fan the flames

Explicit marketing is, well, more explicit:

• Communicate directly with the YouTube community
• Use video responses, subscriptions, and comments to engage in a dialogue

You can also promote viral videos through paid marketing:

• Use YouTube promoted videos to seed discovery
• Use YouTube home page ads for massive reach
• Use other ad platforms to drive traffic to your YouTube watch page

Matthew goes over some basic video optimization tips. A lot of it is an overlap of what I recapped in yesterday’s video optimization post, but I’ll post them anyway:

• Have an accurate, descriptive title
• Provide a unique, accurate description of the video and use complete sentences
• Include thorough, descriptive keyword tags, and avoid keyword stuffing
• Share videos with members of the community
• Experiment with annotations, video responses, and your video thumbnails (you have three default thumbnails to choose from)
• Avoid spamming other users and rating your own videos (YouTube has bots that detect spammy activity)
• Embed videos on websites to make them more discoverable and easier to find on the web
• Check out YouTube Insight, YouTube’s external facing analytics and reporting product that provides video-level data about who, what, when, where and how people came to watch your video
• Try out YouTube Promoted Videos for paid discovery (similar to Adwords)

Barbara Coll, Webmama.com

Barbara used a bed and breakfast as a case study. She stressed the importance of watching for negative content/reviews/mentions of your brand or website and responding to them/addressing them in a prompt and quick manner. Some owners say they don’t or won’t read negative reviews, but you really need to pay attention to what’s being said about your company and put out any fires you can.

Important Takeaways:

• Provide the community with the opportunity to get engaged
• Spread the word and suggest an action
• Monitor the conversation

Brian Ellefritz, Cisco

Winning the award for most mind boggling case study is Brian Ellefritz, who highlighted a series of video campaigns Cisco created and promoted. Their first viral video attempt cost like $250,000 for three videos (or maybe it was $250,000 per video — I can’t remember, but either way, holy crap) and featured some sort-of celebrities (web celebrities?) and their “cribs” (like MTV Cribs). They (understandably) ran out of money and had to go back to the drawing board, plus they realized that not many people know who these web folks are and thus probably don’t care that much about getting a tour of their cribs. I’m not exactly sure what sort of videos they were trying to create with that high a budget, but I can only imagine that a premiere launch at Sundance was their end goal because you can seriously shoot an indie film for that much coinage.

Their second attempt was a video contest with a Heaven and Hell theme where you could submit a video of your crib that was either “angelically simple” or “devilishly disastrous.” The two winners for Heaven and Hell would each get $10,000, with the third place winner getting some coinage as well. I don’t know what cribs have to do with Cisco (I think they were trying to create buzz for a home theater system or something), but they launched the contest and got a whopping 50 video entries that attracted 60,000 page views and 15,000 comments. The winning Heaven video attracted 6,700 views and had 100 comments, and the winning Hell video got 17,000 views and 1,200 comments.

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t really see how this case study is a success. It cost at least $20,000 (in just prize money, not counting the actual marketing spend) to get 60,000 page views, which equates to about $400 per entry (50 entries). With that budget you could have feasibly offered $50 to anyone who uploaded a video entry and awarded $5,000 to the winner and gotten 300 entries. Or you could have spent way way less than $20,000 and done a better job with planning the contest and promoting it. I just think that for twenty g’s (plus the $25o,000/$750,000 for the failed attempt) you could have created something waaaaaaaaaay more successful than their end result.

(Note to all of you attending/speaking at SES or just reading this blog post: if you want to spend $270,000 – $1 million on a viral marketing campaign, hire 10e20. I’m confident we can get you better results than 50 entries and 60,000 page views.)

I think Greg’s wise words of wisdom pretty much sum up viral marketing, so I’ll end with a quote from him:

“You can polish a turd all you want, but it still won’t taste good.”

Basically, a great viral campaign starts with good content and solid ideas. You can have the biggest marketing blitz and spend all the money you want, but if you don’t start with a good foundation and a palatable, marketable idea, your success will be greatly limited.

Bookmark this post: