In The Secret Strategies Behind Many “Viral” Videos that was published on TechCrunch today by guest poster Dan Ackerman Greenberg - the reality of how to make online videos viral sickened many people, even as it got admiration from others.  

Meanwhile, I did some research on Viral Videos looking at sites like Spike, Top 10 Virals and WikiPedia:

"….The term viral video refers to video clip content which gains widespread popularity through the process of Internet sharing, typically through email or IM messages, blogs and other media sharing websites. Viral videos are often humorous in nature and may range from televised comedy sketches such as Saturday Night Live's Lazy Sunday to unintentionally released amateur video clips like Star Wars kid, the Numa Numa song, The Dancing Cadet, and The Evolution of Dance."

"..Internet celebrities

A lot of the "Viral Video" concept comes from the popularity of YouTube and other related websites. The man who popularized, but did not create, the term Viral Video was Kevin "Nalts" Nalty.

YouTube creates Internet celebrities, popular individuals who have attracted significant publicity in their home countries from their videos.^[1] These memes have come from many different backgrounds.

Geriatric1927, one of the most subscribed YouTube members, is an 80-year-old pensioner from England who gained widespread recognition within a week of making his debut on the site.^[2] For these users, the Internet fame has had various unexpected effects. By way of example, YouTube user and former receptionist Brooke Brodack from Massachusetts has been signed by NBC's Carson Daly for an 18-month development contract.^[3] Another has been the uncovered fictional blog of lonelygirl15, now discovered to be the work of New Zealand actress Jessica Rose and some film directors. "

I read the TechCrunch post on The Secret Strategies Behind Many “Viral” Videos earlier today and came back later to read all the comments (191 so far) with most learning more about the slimy business of manufacturing viral buzz than they wanted to - it actually made some people's stomach turn.

But honestly, what Dan Ackerman Greenberg did wasn't really that original, or even that creative - he just manages to get large enough email lists, write provocative enough titles, pick the right clips, sex them up, make up fake accounts for several co-workers who then create controversy on clips to make them seem more viral.

At the end of the day, if done right, it works - but leaves most of us feeling as if what we're responding to on YouTube and other online publishers is just media manipulation. 

While every once and a while, someone does something really noteworthy, has real talent, really does capture people's imagination and gets millions of views of their videos on YouTube, most of the time, according to The Secret Strategies Behind Many “Viral” Videos, that's not how it really works - most of the time, popular videos are there because we've been manipulated, by varies techniques, to view videos that ordinarily, we wouldn't.

About the client mentioned below, I suspect it was a movie studio and the it was probably the Cloverfield Trailer (Cloverfield Trailer - JJ Abrams Buzz - Cloverfield Movie, updated - my post of July 4th, 2007 that brought me fantastic traffic and where I questioned if the whole thing was cooked up by the Movie Studio…..I WAS RIGHT….) that was "manipulated" - just as I thought 5 months ago ….I was right!  Some told me I was making it up ….I wasn't … my instincts were right on!

"…This summer, we were approached by a Hollywood movie studio and asked to help market a series of viral clips they had created in advance of a blockbuster. The videos were 10-20 seconds each, were shot from what appeared to be a camera phone, and captured a series of unexpected and shocking events that required professional post-production and CGI. Needless to say, the studio had invested a significant amount of money in creating the videos but every time they put them online, they couldn’t get more than a few thousand views.

We took six videos and achieved:

• 6 million views on YouTube
• ~30,000 ratings
• ~10,000 fav
  orites
• ~10,000 comments
• 200+ blog posts linking back to the videos
• All six videos made it into the top 5 Most Viewed of the Day, and the two that went truly viral (1.5 million views each) were #1 and #2 Most Viewed of the Week.

Now, it doesn't exactly sound like the same clip I first saw, but then it stuck in my head " The videos were 10-20 seconds each, were shot from what appeared to be a camera phone, and captured a series of unexpected and shocking events that required professional post-production and CGI. "  That's what Cloverfield Trailer was - it just took those events and made different versions, plus made a version where all the clips were merged - creatively, of course.

Meanwhile, the Movie Studio denied all knowledge of the clip, even as it was being shown in major cinemas all over the country as a trailer to the Transformers.

How'd Dan and his company do it?

Make it short: 15-30 seconds is ideal; break down long stories into bite-sized clips

Design for remixing: create a video that is simple enough to be remixed over and over again by others. Ex: “Dramatic Hamster”

Don’t make an outright ad: if a video feels like an ad, viewers won’t share it unless it’s really amazing. Ex: Sony Bravia

Make it shocking: give a viewer no choice but to investigate further. Ex: “UFO Haiti”

Use fake headlines: make the viewer say, “Holy shit, did that actually happen?!” Ex: “Stolen Nascar”

Appeal to sex: if all else fails, hire the most attractive women available to be in the video. Ex: “Yoga 4 Dudes”

Also Dan and his company use a Core Strategy of getting videos onto YouTube's the “Most Viewed”  page by getting 50,000 views very quickly (in less than a day) which pushes the viral video to the top (works the same way as Search Engine Results that are pushed to the top).

• 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 kick starting the conversations by setting up multiple accounts on each forum and posting back and forth between a few different users. Yes, it’s tedious and time-consuming, but if we get enough people working on it, it can have a tremendous effect.
• MySpace: Plenty of users allow you to embed YouTube videos right in the comments section of their MySpace pages. We take advantage of this.
• Facebook: Share, share, share. We’ve taken Dave McClure’s advice and built a sizeable presence on Facebook, so sharing a video with our entire friends list can have a real impact. Other ideas include creating an event that announces the video launch and inviting friends, writing a note and tagging friends, or posting the video on Facebook Video with a link back to the original YouTube video.
• Email lists: Sen
  d the video to an email list. Depending on the size of the list (and the recipients’ willingness to receive links to YouTube videos), this can be a very effective strategy.
• Friends: Make sure everyone we know watches the video and try to get them to email it out to their friends, or at least share it on Facebook.

Title and Thumbnail Optimization is used - putting as much sex into the video and thumbnails as they can get away with - also make the title really catchy.  Slime - but it works- at least, for now.

Also, using several fake accounts and a few co-workers - Dan creates controversy for his viral video clients that gets more people to read and view the video.

Web Analytics Tagging is nothing to brag about - just simple tags added to the URL to tell Google Analytics (for example) where the videos are being viewed from) - no big deal, a kid could do it - and probably does.

Also tagging on YouTube for the subject leads people to view the viral video more often

"…So how do we strategically tag? We choose three or four unique tags and use only these tags for all of the videos we post. I’m not talking about obscure tags; I’m talking about unique tags, tags that are not used by any other YouTube videos. Done correctly, this will allow us to have full control over the videos that show up as “Related Videos.”

What this all leaves most of us with is the impression that people and videos that become viral are doing it using a very specific methodology that would repulse most people because it really has nothing much to do with the actual quality of the content being pushed out.

To put it another way - instead of being viral on it's own merit - content is "manufactured" and manipulated to make it viral - and every trick in the book is used to leverage any way to increase viewing the clip.

But is this where people really want to go?   How much real content out there was viral on it's own merits?