mac309 viral media

Viral Media: Forward/Embed/Share/Play

MAC309robert.jewitt@sunderland.ac.uk

http://twitter.com/rob_jewitt

In this session I’d like to look at one of the emergent trends coming out of the tech space. This session is going to be considering some of the ways in which brands and companies have tried to engage with users in order to establish themselves.

In (1) I’ll look at the emergence of ‘virality’ in recent tech success stories. In (2) I’ll draw on a specific example of a viral business. In (3) I’ll look at some of the risks involved with social media before looking at why certain videos go viral in (4)

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I want to illustrate section (1) by drawing on an idea coined recently by Adam Penenberg, something he calls a viral loop

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‘Viral expansion loops’Adam L. Penenberg (2009) identified a number of successful organisations who incorporated virality into their functionality so that each user begets another user.

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Click to play videos

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Play video

The value of your social network?

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Penenberg’s book has a Facebook application that measures the value of your social network, by working out how well connected you are. A case of you are what you share, measured in dollars. A viral tool to spread his message (ie. “buy my book”) across the popular network

The value of your social network?

Oh, and there’s also an iPhone app. But it’s not available in the UK… “It just goes to show that marketing a book ain't what it used to be” (Penenberg, 2009)

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When something online is free, you’re not the customer,

you’re the product.

When something online is free, you’re not the customer,

you’re the product.

From a Google perspective, you're not the customer. The ad service buyer is the customer. You're the commodity. By making you a more attractive commodity, i.e. by making sure to only serve you an ad if you are in the target population for it, they are making the ads pay better for their customers, and they can reap a large part of the difference to their competitors, the other ad services

- Liorean, 2004

Perhaps because you're not the customer any more. You're simply a "resource" to be managed for profit …Who is the customer? Not you, whose life is reduced to someone else's salable, searchable, investigatable data. The customer is everyone who wishes to own a piece of your life.

- Claire Woolfe, 1999

“Viral strategies aren’t strictly for businesses. They are also seeping into other arenas – like politics. And no one was more successful in imprinting a viral loop into a campaign than Barack Obama” (Penenberg, 2009: 14). Obama raised $55 million online by Feb 2008 without attending a single fundraiser

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“One of my fundamental beliefs from my days as a community organizer is that real change comes from the bottom up … And there’s no more powerful tool for grassroots organizing than the Internet” (Wired, 2009). my.BarackObama.com (aka “MyBo”) was the technological driver of that change.

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Now in section (2), still drawing on Penenberg, I’ll explain how a viral success story emerged using Am I Hot Or Not? as an example of a organisation which took advantage of a socially orientated growth strategy.

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Am I Hot or Not?In October 2000, James Hong and Jim Young were discussing a woman that Young described as the ‘perfect 10’. They had the idea of applying a metric to people’s looks by getting people to vote on pictures in order to establish a consensus.

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Most people are a….?

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✓

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Am I Hot or Not? Day 1October 9th: Hong emailed 42 people the site link. He went to a nearby software call centre (TellMe) and mentioned it to an officer worker there. Within 10 mins the IP address for TellMe was logged and it multiplied as officer workers shared the link

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Am I Hot or Not? Day 1By the end of the day the site had received 37,000 unique views while 200 photos had been uploaded

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Hot or Not? Day 2100,000+ unique visitors. Hong estimated the cost for bandwidth at the present rate of growth to be $150,000 per year. Popularity came with a real cost as people passed on the site address to their friends

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Am I Hot or Not? Day 3Salon.com reporter Janelle Brown called in a story based on the site’s success after a venture capitalists passed on a viral email with a link. It was described as‘nothing more than a virtual meat market’yet‘indescribably horrible … and yet utterly addictive’

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ScalabilityIn order to offset costs decided to host the photos on Yahoo’s Geocities and the site on a cheap 400-mghz Celeron PC under a desk in Berkeley. By 5am the server had been down for 2 hours. The Dean of the engineering department complained the traffic was pulling the entire network down. They were struggling to stay in control of their rapid growth

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ScalabilityLots of media attention, but still no plan for monetisation. They were getting more notoriety and more traffic. By day 8 the site was getting 1.8 million page views per day. Agreed a deal with Rackspace servers who wanted to boost their presence/reputation

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Within 6 weeks the site had 3 million page views, was hosting 3000 photos. However, there was still no clear funding model. The site predated Google’s AdSense service for automated advertisements.

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Scalability

The site faced a number of problems as it grew and funding was being sought. Several users were uploading pornographic content that wouldn’t sit well with potential advertisers. Initially Hong’s parents moderated images but they soon turned to the community to keep the service free of shocking images

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Scalability

Within 2 months the site had counted 7 million page views per day making it one of the top 25 domains online. They had collected 130,000 photos and had generated $100,000 in ad revenue

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Scalability

The site received Cease & Desist letter from racier Am I Hot site after Howard Stern mispronounced the name on air. They changed the name to Hot or Not. The dot-com bubble burst meant that ad revenue dried up

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Scalability

Meet Me?The best way to take advantage of all their regular users was to give them the option of meeting up. By April 2001 they introduced a $6 per month fee for the functionality which generated $25,000 in revenue by the end of the first month ($60,000 by year end)

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www.hotornot.com

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Hot or Not? Definitely HotThe pair rejected a $2m offer from search engine Lycos. By 2004 the site was generating $4m. In July 2006 the site registered its 13th billionth vote and was the third most popular dating site on the Internet. By 2008 they sold it for $20m.

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Users beget usersPyramid schemeChain letters?Sharing key to success

Recent viral success stories?

HotmaileBay

PayPalMySpaceYouTubeFacebook

DiggLinkedIn

TwitterFlickrBlippy

FarmVilleGmailSkypeZyngaEtsy

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Uploaded to Vimeo 20th Feb 2012. Uploaded to YouTube 2 March 2012. As of 29th March 2012 each site has had 17.7 million and 85.9 million views respectively

17th March :Jason Russell of Invisible Children is detained by police for public nudity , making sexual gestures

‘Viral expansion loops’Recap: Penenberg (2009) identified a number of successful organisations who incorporated virality into their functionality so that each user begets another user. An effective social strategy in which a brand’s proposition can be easily disseminated is key, but not everyone gets that right.

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In section (3) I’ll look at how putting social media at the forefront can be a risky strategy for some organisations, despite the advantages that can come with being well known.

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Not all brands benefit from the social strategies of other companies as Kryptonite found out when their expensive bicycle locks found themselves the subject of some unwanted attention

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Play video

When Nestle decided to embrace the power of social media it found itself at the centre of an argument with its fans – namely it decided to police the use of its logo across Facebook. The reason Nestle were so sensitive to their logo’s appropriation by fans, failing to see this as a compliment, was the video Greenpeace made about the company a few days earlier

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Play video

When Andrey Ternovskiy created Chatroulette so strangers could meet other random strangers online it quickly became a hot topic of conversation amongst the tech savvy. When a piano player named Merton record his encounters with strangers and share that on YouTube the service became even more infamous picking up 8+ million views

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Play video

It even spawned a series of imitators including a recreation of the original by professional musician Ben Folds live at a gig in front of an audience in Charlotte, North Carolina

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Play video

In this final section (4) I’ll look at the key factors behind a number of recent successful viral videos

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Web video (powered by Google for free!) has given any one of the us the chance to be famous by giving us the power to get our messages across.

Web video (powered by Google for free!) has given any one of the us the chance to be famous by giving us the power to get our messages across. But how can we be successful against such odds? What are the key factors in securing success in a crowded space?

72+ hours of video uploaded every minute!

3 hours of video every minute from mobile devices

< TINY tiny tiny % of videos have 1 million+ views

Are you a tastemaker?

Play video

Yosemite Mountain Bear didn’t set out to create a viral video. He just wanted to share the amazing thing he’d just seen

tastemakers

This video had been around a while before it’s viral success. Originally uploaded in early February 2011, but saw a spike in traffic around mid-March. Why? Well, it was Friday, but a group of influential tastemakers shared this with a wider group of friends (eg Tosh.O, Michael J. Nelson from MST tweeted about it, bloggers, etc) and a community grew up around this inside joke.

> 10,000 parodies exist!

Saturday

ThursdayWednesdayTuesday

MondaySunday

participation

Nyan cat! Viewed 83+ million times!

Even cats watched this video…

Cats even watched other cats watching this video…

Cats even watched other cats watching other cats watching this video…

What’s significant is that the original video inspired a number of creative spin-offs. There were many different remixes with international themes. A mash-up community emerged off the back of a silly joke, but what’s crucial was that anyone cold participate in it.

randomness

Who could have predicated any of this? Nobody. But the ability to share something quickly, for it to gain traction in noticeable ways, before being amplified throughout communities looking for unexpected things. These elements are key to the success of viral media.

One of the key aspects of features of viral success stories is the emphasis being placed on their social dimensions. By enabling products to be easily shared, embedded or passed on, they take advantage of the human drive for sociability.

Social

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There are, of course, dangers associated with this new found power to share, remix and recirculate digital content. Just ask Jessi Slaughter or Star Wars Kid… Digital technology and the internet are powerful tools and with power comes responsibility.

• # - C!..., 2010, Share• # - @Hella, 2008, Obama• # - Sergio Vaiani, 2009, Scale Stairs• # - Mike Zienowicz, 2007, Joe• # - MissNatalie, 2008, Miss Natalie’s Growth Chart• # - GDS Infographics, 2010,

The Year the Dot-Com Bubble Burst• # - Phil Hatchard, 2010, Sketchbook 2: Internet Dating• # - kurtxia, 2008, Space invaders• # - bitchcakesny, 2008, Weight Watchers Awards• # - Jun Acullador, 2007, Gulf Air• # - plien, 2009, Z4 dash• # - DORONKO, 2010, NIKE +iPod• # – nan palmero, 2010,

Foursquare Pins and Tattoos SXSW 2010• # - yoyolabellut, 2010, Space Invader @ Paris (France)• # - paulszym, 2010,

Step 10 – Place the 5mm Sensor for soldering• # - Nina Leen (LIFE), 1964, B F Skinner training a rat• # - yoyolabellut, 2010, Space Invader @ Paris (France)• # - A. Diez Herrero, 2007, creative commons -Franz Patzig-

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All attempts made to attribute sources but if I’m missed one, get in touch please