Was thinking about this recent video from the KeyBoard Cat plus my own utter exhaustion after writing my book draft, now with McGraw Hill.  The two are connected, believe it or not, because I had a section on the viral videos and one example of this phenomenon  are some of  the KeyBoard Cat Videos.

Due to the space limitations on my manuscript, I had to cut the viral video tracking section where I covered KeyBoard Cat out of my book, so I’ll share some of that content with my readers today as it’s related to this video (which is quite quite and clever) below.

Viral Video Tracking of “The Keyboard Cat” (see below)

First, here’s the original Viral Video of  Charlie Schmidt‘s “Keyboard Cat”! – ORIGINAL!

Searching for an example of a video that appears to be truly “viral” and not manipulated to be viral was daunting but I found one in Charlie Schmidt’s Keyboard Cat.  However, I think the traffic results of Keyboard Cat ended up being produced by Viral Marketers and then further fed by organic growth which fed itself once Keyboard Cat became a public phenomenon.

Reminds me, there’s an  Infographic Case Study from BlueGlass you’ll find in my book (published on Aug 19th, 2011) that informed me on just how much work there is in producing anything “viral”.   Viral accidents are actually pretty rare, I believe.

YouTube Insights shows this video was first uploaded in June 2007 but nothing much happened till end of the year; while YouTube Insights does a good job at showing overall trend it does not show what actually drove the spike of online views on Feb 5^th 2008.

Social Media Monitoring platform Sysomos can help reconstruct what may have happened to take Keyboard Cat Viral.

Source: Sysomos MAP

Note: Sysomos does not have Twitter data all the way back to beginning of 2009.

We must contend with Social Media monitoring platforms are imperfect, but with good planning it is possible to track anything (if enough effort is put into the planning and execution beforehand).  On the other hand, if tracking is not planned for ahead of time (and not matter how hard we plan, more likely than not, end up missing some information that would be nice to have for analysis).

Note: Much of the Twitter data required to get the full representation of its role in Keyboard Cat is missing from their database (I have found a good rule of thumb is that Sysomos has about 25% of the content historically, for twitter – and right now they’re only showing Twitter as far as a year back).

Despite all efforts, it seemed that some of the information necessary to fully analyze this online campaign appears to be missing (again, tracking has to be planned for and set up in advance) .  Google Insights for Search could be applied in an attempt to get the information, but that will only provide data on what happened for Keyboard Cat on Google, not in the rest of the Social Media Universe.

Searching in Sysomos  enabled  me to capture of the most read blogs in May/June 2009 that may have generated the majority of views to the Keyboard Cat video.

I took a look at the top 5 sites where there were posts about the Keyboard Cat in Compete.com and there is clearly potential to generate the viral traffic we see in YouTube Insights (after all, the Keyboard Cat video was out close to a year before almost anyone watched it, according to YouTube data – if you don’t believe me, look at the YouTube Insight chart above).

But when I used Sysomos Map to track down the people who were “spreading the message” about the Cat,  I saw this …

Sysomos showed the original spike in viewership of The Keyboard Cat apparently came from a few highly trafficked blogs which then fanned out and amplified viewership around the video.

Using a Social Monitoring platform such as Sysomos provided a look at specific blog posts in order to see who tweeted about the video and a source to discover the main influencers to watch.  In this example we found a tweeter account which had the most influence (followers) and found among them a high proportion of social media strategists and freelance marketers.

I can’t absolutely prove the KeyBoard Cat was a generated viral phenomenon but since the original video largely languished for a year before anyone much noticed it – it’s likely it took some catalyst, someone who could amplify the message, people with networks of followers to take the content and fan it out – that ‘s just how it is.

Like Gary Vaynerchuk has said (I heard him say it in person) .. I’m recalling his words from memory, I may have left out or over stressed part of his message – but here’s the essence of it (as I understand it).

” you can take a the best bottle of water from a Unicorn’s Ass, and if you don’t have the right marketing, nothing much will happen”.

“I think you can have great products that are not marketed well and will still fail”

“you can have products that aren’t that good marketed well and will succeed”

“ultimately, you’ll need a combination of  product and marketing to succeed”

The data collected suggests Keyboard Cat Internet Meme was at least, indirectly helped along by smart viral marketing as it was by original and entertaining content.    Content is king; but if the content of the video was not any good, no amount of viral marketing would do the trick, or have any lasting impact or value.

The latest Keyboard Kat video is a play off of Banksy and was picked up by Mashable, which almost guarantees it’s going viral – see

Keyboard Cat Spoofs Banksy’s “Exit Through the Gift Shop”

Lately, working with platforms like mPACT, and TRAACKR (who I met with today) has given me additional ideas on how to track influencers around viral videos, but they’re probably not of much help looking back at viral spread that happened a year or two ago and maybe that’s ok.

One of the points of my book on Social Media Analytics , which you can pre order on Amazon is without deep planning, it’s often impossible to fully track anything.   While Social Media, in and of itself, is an activity that is natural to do and many of the tools to create social media (blogs, message boards, video sharing sites, twitter, Foursquare, Social Networks such as Facebook and MySpace, etc) are free, the deeper analysis of the data, isn’t.

Further more, as social media content is massively expanding and it’s adoption to mainstream culture and mainstream business is rapidly occurring, the expectations of people receiving data or insights are evolving and they are expecting more all the time – we should not forget that what seemed great in 2008 and 2009, is old hat in 2010 and boring and unhelpful in 2011.   Our reporting needs to evolve, because the audience is evolving.