Viral Video
by Michael HoffmanThursday, December 28th, 2006
The Holy Grail for those making short web videos is for the video to go “viral.” And if you don’t know what that is, we are not talking about E. coli. We’re talking about a video that takes on a life of it’s own on the web, gets sent by email to thousands of people, gets to be the most popular on YouTube and other sites, and gets written about in the mainstream press. The hundreds of thousands or even millions of views is publicity you could never afford to buy.
But for nonprofits, making something viral is not so easy. In fact, trying to manufacture something to be viral is very difficult. At See3, we believe the best approach is to document the authentic moments that make your organization worthy, and then to creatively edit those into short pieces — and to do a lot of it over time. This way, you have good material for your website, for your events, and the chances that something you produce will find a broader audience is much more likely than taking a long shot with one piece. You should also have reasonable expectations. Will your video get as many hits as the kinds of teenage pranks, fights and embarrassing moments that make up most of this material? Not likely. But if you get 10,000 or 50,000 new people to be exposed to your work is that a victory? You bet.
I came across a funny spoof on this subject. Click here to see it… I had it embedded here, but it played automatically — which drove me crazy. (It is from Ziddio, which is Comcast’s version of YouTube. Their site doesn’t seem to have a search feature, and the automatic playing will drive people away in droves.)
