20/09/2011
http://www.theage.com.au/Melb/RSVIR
September 17, 2011
Person shares virally with 100,000 around the world!
Ever watched a YouTube video with 100,000 views and wondered how it got so many “hits”? Chances are that behind the video is a company working hard to make it happen – a company like this.
Chris , founder of the visual content development group Ripple Studios explains.
“When most people talk about viral (networked) campaigns they’re usually referring to well known videos like John West Salmon with it’s 300 million views, or Quicksilver Dynamite Surfing, which received 12 million views in the 4 days after launch, netting 18% increase in global sales.
Such tremendously successful networked campaigns are much more than just a good video. There are over 60,000 videos uploaded to YouTube each day, but very few will go viral organically because no one can find them, and no one will share them.
In much the same way as a viral infection needs a viable organism, an environment to prosper and a means of distribution, the successful web campaign triangle requires clever audio-visual stimulus, a well-considered target market and a purposely-seeded launch for fast propagation.
The underlying principal of networked marketing is to establish a credible, psychological association of your brand, product and service in the right hemisphere (and to a lesser extent left) brain functions of your potential target market. Web based video campaigns are arguably today’s most valued marketing tools because they're relatively inexpensive and they can influence expansive societal networks not reached by traditional marketing.
Well made, exciting and emotively stirring videos can evoke brand prestige and company / product / service profile with exponentially more clients than your web site, material advertising and sales team alone.
Since 2008 we have been rigorously tweaking the cause and effects of networked campaigns to ensure that our promotional videos maximize the viral potential of the web. I should preface by saying that pre-defining a networked campaign outcome is very difficult but there are three guiding principals we use to maximize the potential of the web for our clients:
1. Your target market is the campaign.
It’s not only what it is, it’s how it spreads - fans are your brand. Design your campaign around why and how your target market would distribute your video. Avoid the common mistake of forcing a concept to fit your brand; your audience will almost certainly be more responsive to your concept than your brand.
Remember your audience will only carry your branded content if it is relevant, it is culturally elevating, it is entertaining, and it creates social or networked benefit.
2. Content is the catalyst
Whoa. Before you go hire your friends wedding videographer, successful campaigns need more science today than ever before. You don’t want to set-up your image badly. Perception very quickly becomes reality on the world stage and it’s very difficult to reverse. We have been engaged to fix too many viral campaign disasters caused by poor content, design and structure. By example - No matter how funny a client may see it, surfing content for tsunami-torn Japan is simply not going to sell insurance, but will severely compromise any brand credibility.
- Your concept needs to cater to your audience’s motives and culture, your content needs to be shareable and it needs to be share-worthy.
- Use the powerful psychological and emotional connections that only audio-visual content can provide. Great video’s might look simple but chances are they have been carefully architected and composed using specialist neurologically effective filming techniques, structure, timing and audio dynamics.
- Over-estimate the acuity of today’s world of visually demanding customers; they are extremely perceptive and have high expectations. Don’t try to disguise an outright advertisement, make it amazing, keep it concise in less than 60 seconds and above all remember the quality of your video will reflect the quality of your brand, so make it stand out in every way.
3. Seed it for rapid growth.
The essence of seeding is to harness the focal points of the webs traffic. Over 100 million videos are currently watched each day on YouTube alone and like other video hubs most are accessed through ‘most viewed video’s’ pages. Being one of 20 videos front paged in YouTubes ‘most viewed today’ gives you potential of 5 million initial views.
Generally a new video has a ‘strike life’ of 48 hours, after which it becomes more challenging to achieve the threshold views to keep it in the weekly or monthly most viewed list. So planning for concurrent seeding of all the relevant web focal hubs is critical.
We use various techniques to help propagate our video’s, from engaging comments, Blog embedding, forum threads and Facebook, to multi-point sharing, email lists and various other tactics that create excitement and interest around the video. While critical to the success of a networked campaign, they do take a lot of resources, effort and experience.
Outlook
In 2010 global Internet video traffic surpassed global peer-to-peer (P2P) traffic and by 2015 Internet video will account for over 60 percent of all consumer Internet traffic. By 2015 it is projected that on average each person will have 2 networked devices capable of distributing internet video, and over 1 million minutes of video will pass through the web every second*.
So while the future of network-based visual content marketing is looking very promising for personal, recreational and commercial promoting, gone are the days where a posted video will go viral organically. As the world internet traffic quadruples the rewards for successful video campaigns are becoming more and more significant, but achieving true viral promulgation takes dedicated creativity, structured methodology, a lot of very hard work and a little bit of luck.”
Ripple Studios is a South Pacific production company headquartered in Sydney with expertise in networked (viral) marketing, business promotion, web development and visual content delivery. Building upon its cornerstone filmmaking reputation and backed with solid web marketing experience it is the much sought after “middle man” between expensive advertising agencies and technical web developers.
Ripple Studios
when image matters
http://www.ripplestudios.com.au
02 94840011
*Data: Cisco Systems Visual Networking Index 2011
