Posts Tagged ‘google juice’

So What Makes a Clip Viral?

This week I’ll be guest blogging with brothers Marc and David Perel of Perelsoft (Cape Town, South Africa), hosts of the popular web serial From the Couch, graphic designers, and web consultants, on tips about how to boost the popularity of your online videos.

It’s a question legions of videobloggers obsess about daily: so what exactly makes a clip viral? What distinguishes a merely so-so clip from the one that rockets to the top of the online leaderboard, and, moreover, what can you do to get your clip into that rarefied stratosphere of mega-online popularity? How does one blend the right words and the right visuals that translate into the all-important mega-metrics?

Here are ten simple rules to follow that are bound to improve your chances:

1) Obey the K.I.S.S. Rule | Keep It Sort and Simple. There is a commonly-agreed upon rule that vidclips are not to exceed three minutes in duration, although the absolute ideal is two to two-and-a-half minutes. We say keep them shorter rather than longer not because people won’t have the time (which is the conventional wisdom) — people make time for quality clips, we know we do — but rather because the chances of your clip going viral drastically diminish with clips longer than three minutes. You don’t want to shoot yourself in the foot from the get-go, so being concise is key.

2) Play that Funky Music… | Always rememeber that a vidclip is a deft combination of both visual and aural features, so it’s critically important to choose the right music if you the viral rewards are to be yours. A tune which crescendos from the instant people hit play and is awfully catchy. For a great example of something that blazed a trail across the webs have a watch (and a listen) to Forever, a hugely-popular wedding clip by Jill Peterson and Kevin Heinz which was set to Chris Brown’s track of the same name. It currently boasts 31.3 million views on YouTube…and rising. On the other side, A Short Love Story by Spanish visual artist Carlos Lascano makes clever use of a moving Sigur Ros track to make a powerful statement about the reach of one’s imagination and the strength of love.

3) Make it Accessible | Viral clips tend to fall within the realm of the common denominator. Now that doesn’t mean you should make them shallow and stupid in order to appeal to the basest of masses, it’s just that intellectual banter and high-falootin’ ideas are for niche audiences only and as a rule this kind of content tends to shoo away what would otherwise be your most influential constituency, the 18-34 set. Although we’ve been shocked to see how inane are the types of clips which go viral these days, don’t be afraid to liberally experiment with styles and contents while simultaneously keeping things easy enough for almost everyone to grasp. The key is to make it entertaining enough that people will want to pass it onward.

4) Pace Is Everything | Like Andrew Keen writes in The Cult of the Amateur, there is so much substandard stuff out there that finding quality material is equivalent to locating that e-needle in a sea of virtual hay. This just makes your mission of producing the best stuff more pressing. Pace — we say — is a key property of what separates the men from the boys in the online world, and iot can range from the manic antics of Ask A Ninja to the laconic pace of the lowest of the low. Our rule of thumb is to produce something with more rapid than slower cuts, shaving down transitions between scenes and spoken bits. If there’s a voice element to it, speak forcefully without those dastardly “oohs,” “umms,” and other hemming and hawing.

5) Use Remarkable Stunning Visuals | One of the more unsung net video heroes online are my good friends at Hudson Street Media, Rob Mills & Will Coghlin who host Political Lunch. Where Rob & Will might have it a bit wrong is in their viral violation of Rule #3 (accessible content), but they are spot-on with their staple use of superimposed graphics, charts, and a wickedly good greenscreen. Yet another example would be the gleanings of Jesse Cowell’s mind in his Drawn by Pain series. It won a series of Webby and other awards a year or so back and is a prime example of a combination of live-action footage with cutting-edge graphic design.

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Part one of a 2-part series.