Common Craft Blog
A Sickening Review of Viral Video Tactics
By leelefever on November 23, 2007 - 1:57am
This almost seems unreal - maybe it is. Dan, a Stanford student, has a chance to make a guest post on TechCrunch about his viral video company. What does he do? He proceeds to make it stunningly clear how misguided and irresponsible his "viral video" tactics are. It reads like a manual for new media douchebaggery.
Some examples:
Blogs: We reach out to individuals who run relevant blogs and actually pay them to post our embedded videos. Sounds a little bit like cheating/PayPerPost, but it’s effective and it’s not against any rules.
Forums: We start new threads and embed our videos. Sometimes, this means kickstarting the conversations by setting up multiple accounts on each forum and posting back and forth between a few different users.
MySpace: Plenty of users allow you to embed YouTube videos right in the comments section of their MySpace pages. We take advantage of this.
Commenting - Having a Conversation with Yourself: A great way to maximize the number of people who watch our videos is to create some sort of controversy in the comments section below the video. We get a few people in our office to log in throughout the day and post heated comments back and forth (you can definitely have a lot of fun with this).
Dan finishes with this bit of perspective and advice...
You simply can’t expect to post great videos on YouTube and have them go viral on their own, even if you think you have the best videos ever. These days, achieving true virality takes serious creativity, some luck, and a lot of hard work. So, my advice: fire your PR firm and do it yourself.
I think I speak for you when I say O_M_G. Dan has the nerve to call his advice ways to acheive "true virality". Doesn't he know that what he's doing is blatantly artificial? I'm floored.
Update: Dan posts again TechCrunch. This time he's saying that he doesn't use all those techniques, he was just saying that that some do. I don't buy it, though I do know Dan has big regrets about his original post. I'm not sure why, but his words and those that support him eat at me in a fundamental way. I've wasted too much time on it already, but I may have to write more just to get it out.
The dude is clearly a first-rate asshat...
But, in every industry, you're going to get the white hats and the black hats. You just have to trust that the black hats get what's coming to them.
PR
Well, I would guess that what Dan is really after is raising his company's profile and getting more work in. It definetly has stirred up a whole bunch of controversy.
Doubletake
That was some article. The worst part - it probably happens a lot more than I imagine even after reading the piece
That makes my ass twitch...
I think I just threw up a little in my mouth.
This is yet another reason I find myself at TechCrunch less and less these days.
Unfortunate
I didn't actually read the article or followup discussion, so I could be repeating, but here's my take:
The truth seems to be that there's no way to create the perfect viral video. You can't control or predict what people will latch onto. The only thing you can do is recreate the circumstances surrounding a video just before it went viral. Heated discussion, forum postings, myspace comments, and influential bloggers are all ingredients to the success of legitimately viral videos. What Dan seems to be advocating (or at least describing) is that you should take control of the only thing that you can, and simulate these events. If there was actually a formula for creating a video that will be explosively popular, no one would share it. I'm not saying I think Dan's tactics are right (I think the opposite) but what other advice could the article have contained. I guess perhaps he could have said "Make videos that people will enjoy," but somehow I don't think that would net as much traffic.
The Common Craft videos are
The Common Craft videos are probably as successful as any. Perhaps Lee should write a "guest" post on real viral video :)
I can only congratulate Dan
I can only congratulate Dan with such a smart idea
Thank you for your vision of
Thank you for your vision of perspective and for advice
As a teacher I think that we
As a teacher I think that we need to educate our students about how artificial these numbers can be.
My Point Exactly
Thanks Gary. I think it's good for us to be aware that some numbers may be contrived. What kills me is that it brings into question the very genuine and authentic numbers that our videos have achieved. Dan describes, with a certain amount of bravado, tactics that are real, but wrong, wrong, wrong. His post does nothing to say that it's a bad business practice - he says just the opposite.
You really can't fake viral
Well I guess Dan and others like him are really just part of the whole "What in the world can traditional marketing minds do with viral campaigns" confusion. I see this "how big are the numbers" mentality all the time. But the reality of viral is that when it takes off, it really takes off, leaving all those pseudo campaigns in the dust. And that is a thing of beauty!
How To Create Viral Video
You can create a little Hollywood at home by blending two images, in which a color from one image is removed , revealing another image behind it.
Ingenious
I think most people look a this in disgust, but I really think it's ingenious - a simple strategy that works...
Karma
I know that Google is now investigating embedded videos with links. It's only a matter of time until this technique backfires on those who perpetrate it.
Then, they will likely whine about how unfair it is. We lived though that with reciprocal linking. Embedded linking is next.