I’ve been doing a touch of YouTube research over the last week + weekend for my Friday sin of not doing enough. Primarily I wanted to find out a formula for virals. I watched a presentation by Cairin Norris about two years ago at SMX London and it fascinated me – what was the secret ingredient behind virality? What made virals so sharable?
Cairin said that virals were basically ‘cool shit that people like to share’ and the biggest viral of all time was YouTube itself – due to the addition of the embed feature which allowed wider sharing. In addition, he outlined five ‘Types of Viral’ (slide 15):
- Ones that are funny
- Ones that are unbelievable
- Ones that pose a question
- Ones that are informative
- Ones that piggyback
And he finished it off by saying, ‘it’s the creative stupid.’ But what needed to be in the creative? If there can be a technique for producing creative ideas (which I have full faith works), then there must also be a technique for producing viral content, since this relied on creative. There was something that needed closer inspection.
Top 50 Videos of All Time
I started my search for the formula at Time Magazine’s ‘Top 50 YouTube Videos of all Time.’ I looked down the list and found four things that linked most of them together:
- Low production values
- Cute
- Funny
- Extraordinary
The final point was the clincher. What makes a video of such low production values so sharable? It’s that it pitches the everyday/mundane vs. the extraordinary. Most of the videos on the list can follow this mantra:
An extraordinary resolution to a mundane event
People can relate to mundane events; from washing up to buying a takeaway meal, most of life is full of them. When you make them extraordinary they become something that people need to talk about. Anecdotes are much the same as online videos in this context. I always tell people about the extraordinary stuff within the everyday and mundane.
The Man, The Meeting and The Coffee Cup
Upon believing this formula, I thought it would be worth testing its application against any event. I messaged a friend on web chat and told him to name a mundane event. He said, ‘Drinking a cup of coffee.’ All we need is an extraordinary resolution.
Consider the following script:
- Man walks into Starbucks.
- Man buys coffee.
- Man walks back to the office holding but not drinking coffee.
- Man arrives at meeting, says hello to his co-workers and sits down at a meeting.
- Man takes off coffee lid and drinks coffee.
This is all terribly mundane. It’s something thousands of people across London do every day. But behold – the extraordinary resolution! Replace the final line with:
“Man takes off coffee lid and a rat leaps out and scuttles across the table in the direction of the female Managing Director, who screams and pushes her table over so the rat can’t get to her. Everyone in the room is hysterical.”
Now you are unlikely to have seen that coming. But it’s the kind of extraordinary resolution that would get people talking. How did the rat get in there? Did you see her face? Was it the disgruntled Starbucks employee who placed the rat? You would probably remember that for the rest of your life. You’d probably share it too.
Of course, this isn’t the only formula for online video. Gary Vaynerchuck didn’t get where he is by following it – he follows another formula which I’ll go onto in my next post in this category. To leave you with the extraordinary resolution to a mundane event, I give you one of my favourite examples:
LOL – he fell off his chair! HA HA!
