go-Digital Blog on Digital Marketing

How to manufacture a viral video sensation and make viral profits – Post 2 of 2

Related: The JKWeddingDance video was real; the viral effect was MANUFACTURED – Post 1 of 2

It was originally discovered and reported that while the jkwedding dance video was real, the viral effect was manufactured by Chris Brown and Sony’s marketing and public relations poeple.

Chris Brown and Sony PR made an unconventional, but really really good, decision to promote a home video on YouTube to drive massive increase in sales and also polish Chris Brown’s tarnished image in the process.

See ReadWriteWeb’s initial article — http://bit.ly/KA3HI

The video of JKWeddingDance was funny and it used Chris Brown’s “Forever” song. Instead of suing them and issuing a take-down order, Sony’s PR department promoted it instead and added an overlay ad to purchase the single from Amazon MP3 or iTunes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-94JhLEiN0

This case reads like a how-to guide to create a successful viral video that drives sales.  They (Chris Brown) did everything right.

By promoting the video (instead of suing to get it taken down), they got the video past the first tipping point of  X thousand views, after which the video remained on the front page of YouTube which gets about 30 million unique users in a day.  Most people don’t look through the ocean of videos on YouTube. Instead, they start with the ones listed on the front page as “most popular, top favorited, or most viewed.”

Then real people continued to amplify the snowball effect — social amplification — and passed along to their friends. This added a viral halo on top of the original promoted views. The viral halo is low to no cost to the advertiser so any profits derived from it is pure viral profit.

For a step-by-step guide to creating a viral video, see

http://go-digital.net/blog/2009/08/how-to-make-a-viral-video-a-5-step-guide

Viral hits can be manufactured. A group which has done this successfully and reproducibly is ImprovEverywhere (see their YouTube channel below). They have MANY YouTube videos which have hundreds of thousands of views, and their latest hit — No Pants Subway Ride – achieved 8 million views in 3 months.

http://www.youtube.com/user/ImprovEverywhere

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