Social Media Marketing Blog

I love social media, I really do. It fills my inbox with great blog posts to read, see where my friends are in the world, and makes me laugh and shocked at the same time with viral videos. It could be said that much of YouTube’s success comes from the creation of viral videos and well crafted campaigns that rely on video for effective launches (I’m looking at you film and gadget industry). So what I think I would look at today is not so much how to create a viral video (that’s for another post) or how to distribute it affectively across all the major channels (yet another post) but what happens afterward, what could really determine whether it is truely a success.

You should just be calling them videos first

You as a marketing team or content creators do not decide whether or not a video will go viral or not. It’s be democratic election and natural exponential growth. Your main job is to launch and feed your creative to the major channels, and let the people make the choice. Sure there are elements or a premise that can increase the chances of pick up (think pain, humor, controversy and cats) but there is no correlation to adding cats and instant viral success.

What was the point of the video?

All online campaigns need to have a point, and videos are no exception. Depending on the goal of the creative, the call to action that you put at the end needs to motivate. So if your a film agency, you might create a video about how stop motion ninja’s unboxed a NexusOne phone. The point being the client requested the video and the branding at the end identifies the person that made the film, perfect promotion of the product and the filmmaker.

In this case, I am assuming Google wanted a video that would appeal to its target market and establish the “coolness” of the phone.

But the one thing that was missing after those cool ninjas was what to do next? Do I buy the phone? Should I go get some ninja figurines? Should I talk about the video with my friends? I wasn’t too sure.

Naturally it wants me to go find out more of the website, but didn’t really guide me in the right direction, even at the end after all the credits.

The Point: Make sure you motivate your viewers to take action.

How to track buzz into conversions/sales?

You really need to make sure you have consulted with the web traffic/data analysis team to make sure all links mentioned, or any video embedding has some of tracking enabled. If you are using YouTube - YouTube Insights will be a very handy friend.

But before you launch the video to, your website should be able to handle the bursts in traffic. You will be expecting spikes in traffic on and off over a couple of weeks as it gets shared around. But then those thousands (possibly millions) of viewers will then probably want to check out your website. Can your server 100000 extra visits everyday for 2 weeks? Can your website load within a reasonable amount of time so people are not turned off as to leave?

And the most important of all is have you created a landing page for your campaign? Do you want to spend all the money in the world with a product launch video, that have generated thousands of words, to the bog standard homepage with the same generic content that get’s feed to searchers, repeat visitors and search bots? No, the best move is to make a dedicated landing page that perfectly ties into the idea and product promoted in the video and the money making button for them to click.

The Point: Make sure you website has been modified to handle massive spikes in traffic and to have an appropriate landing page to direct people to do after the video.

What happens if I don’t?

If you don’t follow the steps above, here are a few possible outcomes:

• Your website server will crumble over the hits and present people with errors.
• Your video will be lost in the crowd of next week’s viral offering.
• You will not be able to calculate the effectiveness of the video.
• It will have been an extremely costly exercise with no visible ROI
• Potential damage to your brand reputation as articles that cover failed viral campaigns normally go more viral than the actual campaign.

So keep these things in mind before you head into the world of viral video!