Going Viral

(Justin Bieber didn't make it on talent alone)

 Online Buzz
http://goanimate.com/videos/0tKmesUHZiQc/1
 Why do we need to know why some
things go viral?

There are three reasons for pursuing this question:

1. To be heard: in the midst of information overload, how can we be heard?
This is a question for advertisers, promoters, politicians and everyday
internet users. How can we become more efficient and impactful
broadcasters on the internet?
2. To be aware: how does the content we see on our screens reach us? Is it all
by merit? Popularity? Or are there ‘tricks’ which massage our experiences of
the internet that we should be aware of? How can we become more critical
consumers of the internet?
3. To be in control: how can we shape our presence on the internet? How
can we influence how Web 2.0/3.0 serves us?
 Definitions

To 'go viral': to spread rapidly through peer references; the rate of

hits/views rises exponentially; viral posts/videos are typically viewed
more than 100,000 times.

“Viral videos”: online video clips that gain widespread popularity when
they are passed from person to person via e-mail, instant messages,
and media-sharing Web sites.

"Viral marketing": has emerged as the electronic form of WoM and

involves the principle of passing on or referring news, information or
entertainment to another person.
"Word of Mouth (WOM)": offline and online person-to-person
communication.
 Two Broad Approaches
Content Counts Method Matters

• Main idea: the content of • Main idea: the online

an artefact is what makes marketing of an artefact is
it go viral. what makes it go viral.

• Focus question: what • Focus question: who

makes artefacts go viral? makes artefacts go viral?
 Content: a selection of opinions
West, 2011:
• Short title (3 or fewer words)
• Short run-time (less than 2 minutes)
• 'Irony' (something contradictory to social expectations)
• Music

Buzzfeed:
• lists
• quizzes (appeal to vanity - make the user look good)
• relevance
• catchy title
• humour
http://www.buzzfeed.com/awesomer/how-to-go-viral

Jonah Peretti (founder of Buzzfeed):

• engaging content: humourous, original, and/or controversial
http://socialtimes.com/how-to-go-viral_b22436
 What Makes Online Content Viral?
Jonah Berger and Katherine L. MiLKMan

 - Emotion shapes virality. Content that evokes high-arousal

positive (awe) or negative (anger or anxiety) emotions
is more viral. Content that evokes low-arousal, or
deactivating, emotions (e.g., sadness) is less viral.
- - Activation drives social transmission (when a story evoked
more sadness, it decreased arousal, which in turn decreased
transmission).

- More emotional, positive, interesting, and anger-inducing

and fewer sadness-inducing stories are likely to make the
most blogged list.
Content: Creative Determinants of Viral
Video Viewing
(Southgate, Westoby & Page, 2010)

Criteria used to predict the success of TV ads can also be used - with some
adaptation - to predict online virality:
• enjoyment, involvement, branding
• distinctiveness
• celebrity popularity
• likelihood to forward ('buzz')
o has LEGS: Laugh-out-loud funny, Edgy, Gripping or Sexy (Nealon, 2007)
 Method: Strategies for going viral
• Use of social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube etc.
• Word of mouth: hearing what's popular from people around you.
• Participation (Burgess, 2008): users participate by commenting, sharing,
'favouriting', making 'mashups' or their own versions
 Method: Online Buzz & Offline WOM
(Lapointe, 2011)

- the combination of online buzz and offline word-of-mouth (WOM)

greatly effects the messages presented in online material
- Lapointe calls this the "rock in the pond": users of social media are
heavily influenced by their exposure to advertising in other media (ie.
television, magazines, etc.)
 Method: Negative vs. Positive WoM
• Negative word of mouth (NWOM) can have a greater effect on
customer acquisitions than positive word of mouth (PWOM)
• negative comments attain more diagnostic value of existing
customer sentiments, while actual recommendation rates or
reported PWOM are inflated or unreliable
• 3 key variables:
o Magnitude of the message
 quantitative and qualitative distinctions between bad and
good buzz translate into differences in the weight of the
message that they carry
o Magnitude of the effect on individuals
 humans are sometimes more likely to remember negative
events than positive ones
o Memory and spread of the message
 negative comments are likely to survive more easily across
time and space.
 negative information doesn’t only stick – it sticks longer
 Charlie bit my finger!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OBlgSz8sSM

If you know about this video, where did you hear it from?
• WoM?
• Social Media?
• Recommender (e.g., YouTube 'Most Viewed Videos' list)?
 Method: Viral Marketing
• Encourages people to pass on a message
• Depends on a high pass along rate from person to person
• Motivators:
o entertainment: fun, humour, games, quizzes, videos, songs
o greed: sweepstake enteries, free offers
o charity: help an organization, sign petitions

• Methods: face-to-
face
communication,
phone
conversations,
text/instant/e-mail
messeges, blogs,
threads
 Method: more strategies
Advertising executive Dan Greenberg boasts he gets 100,000 views on
YouTube for his clients' videos, or he doesn't get paid. Here are some
of his strategies:
First, get 50,000 views to get on the Daily Most-Viewed' page:
• pay people with relevant blogs to link to the video
• create fake conversations (forums) around the video
• embed videos directly into the pages of MySpace users
• create and exploit an extensive Facebook presence
• use email and friends network

Then, to reach 100,000+ views:

• Focus on making title and thumbnail attractive
• Release all videos in a campaign simultaneously, then use unique
tags to get only the other videos in the campaign appear in the
Related Videos box.
http://techcrunch.com/2007/11/22/the-secret-strategies-behind-many-viral-videos/
 Method: Search Engine Optimization
Site designers use Search Engine Optimization (SEO), configuring a website so
that search engines will find it quickly and easily, and thus place it high in the
search results list. Designers consider how search engines work, and tailor the
website to be ‘search engine friendly’.

SEO influences how search results are displayed; obviously, it can be used as a
marketing strategy. However, it can also be used maliciously.

According to a recent New York Times article, Montana blogger Crystal Cox was
recently fined $2.5M for defamation for one of a series of blogs against Kevin
Padrick, an Oregon lawyer. Cox used SEO to get her pages - which accused
Padrick of unprofessional conduct, malpractice and embezzlement - displayed
ahead of Padrick's own website when prospective clients searched Padrick's
name.

“I have a gift for getting on top of search engines...”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/12/business/media/when-truth-survives-free-speech.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1&n
l=todaysheadlines&emc=tha210
 Is 'viral' even the right term?
Ideas are accepted by a culture when that culture is ready for them. A better analogy is a
forest fire: some fires, if the conditions are right, become monsters (Duncan Watts, in
Thompson, 2008).

The 'viral' analogy does work: ideas spread in a similar way to diseases, but the
parameters need to be significantly changed - e.g., what takes weeks for a disease to do
might take years for an idea to do (Bettencourt et al, 2005) [note: this studty considered
the spread of scientific ideas pre-internet]. Holme and Huss (2011) disagree, but don't
provide an alternative analogy.

The analogy has some flaws. For example:

• How do you recover from catching an idea?
• Can people be 'immunized' against an idea? Apparently, yes: if people adopt an idea,
then switch to another (possibly competing) idea, they are effectively 'immunized'
against the first idea.
• People who catch a disease isolate themselves; people who catch ideas actively work
to spread them
(Bettencourt et al, 2005)
 Marshall McLuhan: "The Medium is the
Message"

- the 'content' of any medium is always another medium (ex. the

content of writing is speech)
- the medium shapes and controls the scale and form of human
association and action
- medium itself, not the content it carries, should be the focus
- a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not only by the
content delivered over the medium, but also by the characteristics of
the medium itself
 McLuhan and going viral
What medium goes viral most? Video!

Why?

Video is:
• sharable: "If it doesn't spread, it's dead" (Usher, 2010)
• participatory: viewers can comment, re-use, share; participation is a
major factor in the online spread of videos (Burgess, 2008)

Are there other reasons why video seems to goes viral more than
printed material?

What message does the medium of video convey?

 Malcolm Gladwell, Tipping Point
The Law of the Few
• some people are more important than others when it comes to spreading
ideas:
o connectors: people who know and who connect lots of other people
o mavens: people who love information - gathering it, and sharing it
o salespeople: people who persuade others to accept an idea
• based partly on Stanley Milgram's 1967 'six degree of separation' experiment,
which found that certain people are more 'connected' than others

This is a popular statement of the 'Influentials' view of marketing, also

propounded by Katz & Lazarsfield, in Personal Influence (1955), and Keller &
Berry, in The Influentials (2003).

Duncan Watts refutes Tipping Point; suggests going viral is based on a culture's
readiness to accept new ideas (Thompson, 2008).
 Web 3.0/Semantic Web

There is now too much information on the web for humans to fully process and
utilize. We need machines to do this for us.
• Semantic Web:
o all information on the web written in a computer 'language' with universal
meanings - e.g., consistent tags
o this lies behind the user interface, which is still in 'humanspeak'
o Programs will now be able to access ALL information
 more powerful search services
 recommender services
 predictive services
• Web 3.0: the services web
o with A.I.-driven algorithms, the web will provide individualized information-
based services (Domingue et al, 2009)
 The Tipping Point and Web 2.0/3.0

Web 2.0 Web 3.0

Connectors
• 'Super-users' of social sites
like Facebook, myspace, etc.;
have many more 'friends' than the
average user
Mavens
• 'Super-users' of sharing sites like
Reddit; bloggers
"e-fluentials" (Kirby & Marsden, 2005)
Connectors
• Programs that trace connections
between users and suggest more
connections - e.g., friend
suggestions on Facebook - only
more precise and powerful than
before
Mavens
•
Web 3.0 search engines: tailored
to the user
 Making Web 3.0 serve us

Lerman and Ghosh examine how the organization of social media sites affect user activity
on those sites. Understanding this will help us use those sites more effectively (Lerman &
Ghosh, 2010).

"Currently these systems blindly aggregate activities of all users in order

to identify high quality contributions. However, since popularity and quality are
rarely linked (Salganik, Dodds, and Watts 2006), this method is likely to
highlight popular, yet trivial contributions." (page 8)

"[If we] are able to understand and model information spreading in social media one can
weight the information properly which would be useful for e.g. recommender systems."
(Holme & Huss, 2011, page 3)