VIRAL VIDEOS, A DEFINITION
We hear a lot about viral marketing these days, and especially viral videos. This method of exposure is pretty easy to understand, actually; it’s just word-of-mouth, but on the internet. “Viral” refers to the contagious nature of successful viral marketing. One person enjoys it and spreads it to two other people, those two spread it to two other people, and so on and so on. This is why someone can post a two minute video on Youtube, show it to a few friends, and within a week have hundreds of thousands of views.
This can make advertising or just making a video for fun and getting it to a wide audience a work-free endeavour. You put something out there, everyone likes it, and they start sharing it with one another, posting it on their blogs and MySpace pages, and, if you’re really lucky, maybe it gets featured in a mainstream news outlet or even commented on in a late night talk show monologue.
That is… as long as people do like it. It’s actually kind of tricky to stumble upon just the right idea, something that will hook the viewer and inspire them to tell all their friends “You gotta see this!” As such, we can’t guarantee any video you make will go viral, since nobody, not even the people who regularly reach millions of hits on their videos, know exactly what that special ingredient is. But, we can send you in the right direction, and you may just get that lucky break into the so-called collective consciousness.