10 Yetis Guide - How to Go Viral - Viral Marketing tips

Andy here with a not so short video featuring myself and Shannon, talking though how to help campaigns "go viral". The bottom line, there is nothing anyone fears more, agency side, than when a client says "how can we make this 'go viral'". It is a phrase we all dread as I firmly feel that nothing truly goes organically "viral" anymore. The campaigns that do take off have an initial budget to cater for the Pay to Play aspect of social media that tends to launch campaigns that end up going mainstream.

If there is not a Pay to Play budget then quite often there is a database that content is "seeded" out to in order to give it a load of views at the point of launch. These databases cost money though, hence our thought that nothing is organically viral anymore.

Anyway, this is not a short video, it is around nine minutes and is more of a video guide for "how to go viral". It has actual tips and hints and is not just the theory behind campaigns.

Here is the transcript...

Hi, my name is Shannon Peerless and I am Head of PR here at 10Yetis, and my name is Andy Barrand I am managing director here at 10 Yetis Digital. One of the most annoying things about viral marketing campaigns is the fact they are called viral and also when clients come to you and say "I want make this to go viral" and you say "I want to hit you with a fish".

I think the whole idea of this is that you can't come up with a viral marketing idea, you can only come up with an idea that you can hope goes viral. There is a couple of key things for us. Does the idea have the pub factor, can you imagine your mates talking about whatever you are proposing sharing it. Is it easy to share.

If we come up with an idea in the office for a client, and we all go off on a tangent then that is a good indication that it is going to go well, in the open.

I guess there are a couple of fundamentals that we have found and I think we did a piece of research around how Gangnam Style went viral. The big thing about that was that they had a ready built database of a couple of million people so when they immediately launched the song they could get 500 thousand views on the first day which automatically flags it up to YouTube as a fast growing video. It is about having that database and that influencer campaign and plans ready.

The whole point of trying to make things go viral is that you need people to be receptive to it, the people you are sending it to. The best way to do that is if you warm them up beforehand. So build a relationship with them and the old adage of don't try and F**k them on the first date.

In term of the kind of content that goes viral. The number one thing is anything that is going to make them laugh. Anything with cute fluffy animals. Also, more serious heart-warming things that has a good positive or touching message to it.

Obviously, if you brand a pug dog with your logo then these are the kinds of things that have historically done well on the internet. Looking at things that have historically done well on the internet, for us it is things like top 100 lists, Shannon did one a couple of months ago for Buzzfeed. The top 100 things you need to know about Public relations. It did really well and the whole industry was talking about it. So it is those kinds of things where you make it a really big piece of content and I think it was Buzzsumo or Buzzstream where they were talking about things that evoke awe, or humour that typically do well.

You need to make sure that you have a particular audience that you are going after. Just because something goes viral amongst a certain group of people does not mean it will do well with another group so if it is something that is sector specific, that kind of area that you are trying to target, you just need to get the message spot on right from the beginning.

One of the frustrating things, especially because we are trying to create a how to guide here is that when we looked at Socialsanta.co that was a big hit for us the last few years and who were the big influencers that kicked it off, it was actually the gaming community that give it that initial boost. They saw it, alot of famous gaming bloggers spoke about it on Twitter and then that leaked over to the One Direction fans. You can never really tell. You think that one particular niche may be interested but you cannot really tell. It is best to cast your net wide and this comes back to getting those big databases built that you can actually go out to when it launches.

Yeah because you can't just go from a cold start, you have to have somewhere that you are targetting, you cannot just create something and then hope for the best. You have to have an action plan of how you are going to get it out.

One of the key things for us and one of the key things we talk about in terms of the nitty-gritty things to do, and Gangnam Style is a good example, is having catchy bright images, not just something off your iphone, you need pro-stuff to support it. And this is probably consistent across all forms of content marketing and not just about viral campaigns, about having pro images and making it the best that it can be. Putting things out there that are Royalty Free so people can make it into a meme and share it. Just doing these basic things that will really help and making it as easy as possible for people to share.

It is rare that something goes viral without a good video or a good image or photo and if you don't have that you are going to struggle to get anything to go viral.

When you look at how you actually kick off campaigns, obviously you have your database you are going to push stuff out to but the key thing to remember nowadays is that it is very much Pay to Play on social media. Unless you have a decent budget to put behind initially seeding it on Facebook and Twitter and places like that to get that groundswell, it is very unlikely that it is going to take off.

In our experience as well, there is not really much point in bothering with trying give something exclusively to someone if you are trying to go viral because what happens then is often you get stuck waiting around for them to use it and you promise them that you won't go anywhere else with it and that can really delay it taking off. Really your best bet is to go widely with it from the Get-Go.

If we draw on the example of Beard-Olympics that we ran this year and had a couple of million unique views. There is a couple of things there. We went to a lot of influencers that we could see talking about hipster things and did outreach to them. We had a decent sized advertising budget to kick it off but also, with a lot of these things there is an element of luck. We often talk about the 10:1 ratio. For every 10 campaigns that we think are going to fly it comes down to only one of them works. A lot of it is launching at the right time, not having much media distraction in terms of the big stories that are going on and really relying on the databases that you pull together that we spoke about before.

That goes back to timing as well, if you are looking to release something when you know there is something big coming up, like a budget being announced or something like that, it is probably just going to absolutely die really. You need to make sure that there isn't anything big planned in the media agenda that it is going to clash with and get lost under.

It is about understanding the cycle of these campaigns of these campaigns now, they are so short, and Gangnam Style is probably one of the longest pieces of content marketing. They managed to spin it out for a few months because they had a clear plan of what they were going to do when it started to slow down. They planned to bring in new elements and the new element after the launch was announcing the Psy had been signed by Scooter Braun so they were able to extend it for a bit longer and then there was the Guiness World Record around the most amount of views so that gave it an extra couple of days. Nowadays content lives for a few days, dies, and people move on. You are hoping that whatever your end result, whether that is newsletter database growth, or bottom line sales, which is the main thing, it is about realising that these things don’t last for very long anymore. You just have to crack on and make hay whilst the sun shines.

Just to wrap this up in terms of some of the tools that we use to get things going and actually make things go viral. One of the most important things is targeting journalists. We use media lists which we build through the likes of Features Exec and that enables us to build targeted lists that we can approach journalists via with the content or images that we have. That is a really good place to start. Also Twitter, that is one of the key platforms on which things do go viral. Enabling hashtags, target influencers on there, wether it is targeting influencers directly or just approaching them and asking them to tweet something out for you. As well as that there is Facebook.

From a content discovery point of view and understand what has historically done well and rip it off, there is Buzzsumo where you can go in and see what kind of content has done well. And then you move on to, ok, you have launched your campaign, and what kind of tools can you use to keep that campaign doing well. We use things like Topsy to see where conversations are happening and where influencers are getting involved. There is all that upstream and downstream information, so you have places like Bluenod where you can see who is influential in that sector and try and tap them up and then you have got Lissted, from the guys at Realwire where you can go and see ready-made lists on Twitter of influencers with particular sectors. It is easier now, four or five years on from Gangnam Style, to actually put together these outreach lists. There are loads tools out there that can help you do that.

Thank you very much for listening to us prattle on. What would you say, Shazzlar, is the golden rule of going viral?

Don’t say going viral.