It’s been a week of surprises; both on the populist culture front and on the business front. First, we saw Susan Boyle shoot to instant stardom, courtesy of a breathtaking performance of ‘I dream a dream’ from Les Mis on Britain’s Got Talent, which was immediately uploaded to YouTube and has already attracted over 17.5 million views throughout the world, attracting comment from celebs like Ashton Kucher and Demi Moore. Then we have the photos of anti-capitalist Nicky Fisher who was ‘brutally attacked’ by an unnamed police officer, all conveniently captured on video/camera and sold to the highest bidder for c£50K (I thought the whole point of anti-capitalism was that money was the root of all evil?) Nokia, the once darling of the mobile phone world, fails to curtail growth forecasts and suffers a 90% downfall in profits, citing the popularity of the iPhone as one of the principal reasons. Finally, a couple of employees at Domino’s have become infamous for shifting the perception of the brand from positive to negative in a couple of days (according the market research firm YouGov) by releasing a ‘day in the life’ video on YouTube, which shows them doing inhuman things to food in preparing it for general consumption. Domino’s went quickly into damage-control mode, inevitably firing the employees and producing its own video of apology and reassurance, as well as succumbing to the inevitable and delving into Twitter. All too late.
As you can see, our theme this week is about the viral element of campaigning. We live in such a short-termist society, that a well-planned and well executed viral can have a huge impact on a campaign; something that marketeers have recognised over the past few years, but struggled to implement consistently. The great thing about using the web as a medium to drive viral campaigns is that the advertising regulation isn’t as stringent, so you can push creative boundaries a lot further. The challenge is that is can be extremely tricky to know what will and what will not take off. Given the rise in prominence of brand response advertising in HR Recruitment, it is something we should all start thinking about, so I’ve got a couple of sites to help get you started.
Viral Video Chart (http://www.viralvideochart.com/)
I’ve seen Jim sneakily peeking at this site during his lunch hours and aside from the guffaws/sniggering it induces (well, it’s better than his mobile ringtone) it is a pretty useful site. Imagine YouTube with tracking capability. The site allows you to deconstruct the popularity of a video by tracking how and where people are talking about it – just click on one of the video links and look at the data on the right hand side. Great stuff.
Viralbank (www.viralbank.com)
Once the darling of the viral world, this site has fallen by the wayside of late, but it is still a useful repository of videos, microsites, emails, photos and games.
PotNoodle (http://www.potnoodle.com)
Pot Noodle are the kings (or queens) of viral and can often be relied on to come up with engaging, weird and whacky campaigns to keep us on our toes. The most prominent from last year was PotNoodle, the Musical but I can’t get the link to work (www.potnoodlethemusical.com) So I’ve sent you a link to the main website. I love the fact that there is a section of the site called ‘Nutrition’ that, when you actually look at it contains two facts about the product and then some general useless tat.
Twitscoop (http://www.twitscoop.com/)
Part of your planning approach for viral campaigns will be to understand what is current and how to adapt it. Twitscoop is a site that provides a live feed on topics that are being discussed. The site trawls hundreds of tweets every minute and extracts the words which are mentioned more often than usual. The result is displayed in a Tag Cloud, using the following rule: the hotter, the bigger (no joke here). Quite often you will find that you have access to hot topics way before the they actually hit the mainstream information channels! For those of you who remember how accurate Google Trends was at predicting the outbreak of ‘flu epidemics, just imagine how much more potent this is…