Thanks to Think Media TV and Life in Student Ministry for reviewing my book, Beyond Viral, and how the tips can help non-profits, charities and ministries not just corporate promotions. It’s nice to hear how Sean and Tim (their YouTube accounts linked by name) are using my book for good not evil. 🙂
Click below image to hear what parts of the books they found useful for non-profits and faith-based education. I’m really excited to think about the book helping such worthy causes as the spiritual development of kids.
Thanks also to Buddha Charlie for documenting his purchase of the book!
Ministries use youtube promotion to help charities and non-profits
As I mentioned in a recent video (“Advertising Doesn’t Have to Suck,” I’m off to Blogworld. It’s the “South by Southwest” of social media, and packed with bloggers, vloggers, and even stupid people. Steve Garfield (fellow video enthusiast) is leading a session, and we’re both doing book signings on Friday. On Friday, he signs “Get Seen” at 2:00 and I sign “Beyond Viral” at 2:30. I plan to stalk his fans holding a sign that says, “if you liked Get Seen, you might also like Beyond Viral.”
By the way, I was chatting with Mark Douglas (KeyofAwesome) last week at the Next New Networks office…Oh sorry, did I name drop? While in NYC I also saw iJustine, MysteryGuitarMan, ShaneDawson, ShayCarl and CharlesTrippy (see video proof).
Anyway, Mark and I were discussing what “viral” means anymore, and the number 4 million seems about right. Only a few videos hit that number in the month they’re posted. So let’s go with 4 million as 2010 viral, but that means 4 million views right away- not cumulatively over months or years.
I need to clarify again that my book proclaims “viral is dead” for commercial videos, I do not contend that viral video will ever end. Ever. As long as we humans like to experience something together at the same time, we’ll have viral hits. It’s just that they’ll rarely be advertising videos… and I don’t like to see brands cede their online-video marketing strategy and tactics to “going viral” due to these low odds.
So here’s the teleporting fat guy appearing again, featuring Smosh’s Ian and Anthony traveling forward and back in time, and meeting their future selves. You gotta love Smosh for persisting and persisting with their comedic duo even when their managers sometimes sell ’em out too much. Smosh could pimp Amway and I’d still love ’em.
Wait- was this post about Smosh or about how many views it takes to make a video meet the definition of “viral”? Oh who cares. Just watch the face of Teleporting Fat Guy when he hears about the sponge bath. Hey did I include Smosh in my book? I can’t remember.
Beyond Viral: All the benefits of Ambien without side effects
So you’re too busy to buy a copy of my book (Beyond Viral), but maybe want a quick scan of the topics? Here are some of the key points addressed in each of the 18 chapters… these digital documents also identify the many experts who contributed to the book.
The cheat guide to Beyond Viral
From Daisy Whitney (This Week in Media), Mark Robertson (ReelSEO) and Ben Relles (Barely Political/Next New Netowkrs)… to “YouTube Stars” like CharlesTrippy, VenetianPrincess, RhettandLink, ShayCarl, Mediocrefilms, and Daneboe/Annoying Orange. Thanks to all of you!
It’s called a “sneak preview,” but I hope you’ll read it and consider picking up the actual book. There was no way I could have summarized it in 5-20 pages because the book has loads of examples and details.
The law, friends. Take out your #2 pencils and steno pads. You’re about the learn The Nalts/Murphy “Inverse Creation & Consumption” Law. And you can get a free copy of my book, which doubles as a decorative monitor stand.
The gal pictured above — contorted like a memorable scene from Exorcist — is journalist, speaker and author Daisy Whitney, and she’s giving out 3 copies of my book if you tweet with #beyondviral. I’ll match it by giving away 4 copies of Beyond Viral via Amazon, and give you through Friday, Sept. 24. She wants you to tweet with #beyondviral on why you’d like the book. I’m giving out 4 copies to the funniest tweets with #beyondviral.
In related viralility news, PC World Magazine recently provided us with the well-kept secrets to producing a viral video. Writer Christopher Null “ferreted out the top themes that make a video go viral.”
The secret sauce? Singing, dancing, injury, animals, medications, babies, hysteria, parody and remixes. How’d the Amazon/Woot video do on those criteria?
Lest I get cynical about the methodology that drove Null’s ferreting, I should echo his disclaimer that chance plays a role: “It’s art, luck, and, usually, a lot of simple stupidity.”
I hope people realize that when I proclaim “viral is dead” (see mini-educational video on beyondviral.com), I’m not saying that we’ve seen our last viral videos. Heavens, no. As long as we humans possess a collective desire to share in an unusual experience, we’ll have videos that “go viral” like eager germs. I’m just saying that marketers, brands and advertisers are better off not chasing the viral dream… and instead do some things that will work by orders of magnitude more exponentially (take that, mathematician editors). That’s the point of my book.
Wait– that’s the point of you reading the book. The point of me writing the book was to learn you something, sell more copies than Steve Garfield’s Get Seen, artificially impress people, and accelerate my career as a public speaker in the marketing and digital circuits (I had to disclose that because the kids are saying transparency is all the rage in social-media these days).
Gather around kids. We're going to learn about viral video and bird poop!
It’s almost time to soak in the latest “This Week in Media” podcast show 201 titled Beyond Viral. But first let me introduce my Nalts/Murphy’s “The Inverse Creation & Consumption” Law. All web content will be consumed inversely to the time you spend creating it. Let’s rank these four in order of time spent creating: 1) The book, 2) The episode of “This Week in Media,” 3) the blog post you’re reading, 4) this video I’m about to do about this blog post. Now let’s review them in order of views/consumption: 1) the video, 2) this blog post, 3) TWIM and 4) the book. See how it works?
You can find the “Beyond Viral” episode on iTunes or stream it from Pixel Corps. Daisy Whitney and Tim Street co-pilot the weekly podcast (Clayton Morris joins them sometimes), and guests include Lon Seldman (Local Online News TV) and… me. Gammit my hyperlink fingers hurt. Dogs bark, phones ring, connections drop… entertaining all 7 listeners – eight if you just tuned in. It’s like college radio, only you might learn something — especially from Tim Street. Tim’s that guy you knew in highschool whose humor might distract you from his genius. In this episode he’s dialing in from an app convention you’d not otherwise know about but for him. He says you’re gonna have to start paying more for bandwidth, so put that on your worry shelf.
If you have the patience, you’ll eventually hear me curse Verizon’s bandwidth problems as the company coincidentally breaks up my voice-over IP connection… little bastards. I’m listening to my creative use of the English language as I type, goodly. Before the show taped yesterweek, I made up an acronym about how to engage via online video: DAISY. What’s it stand for? I don’t remember. But if you have ears and the will, you’ll discover that you can’t show up to a cocktail party, take off your shirt and hand out your business cards. It’s not polite, says Street, who describes seagull YouTubing in the podcast. You also don’t need to smash rocks to make fire if there are bic lighters hanging around. But hey I respect your space, man. Rocks are fun.
Mockingbirds by Daisy Whitney.
Speaking of birds, Mockingbirds is Daisy’s new book- it’s fiction and it’s about date rape. Mockingbirds addresses a heavy topic, but Daisy hopes it will encourage kids and parents to discuss the topic… If that stops one date rape, I’m guessing she’ll be happy. Check Mockingbirds out on Amazon. If you don’t buy… it then you’re pro date rape.
I’m meeting Daisy and Axis of Comedy‘s Paul Kontonis in NYC tomorrow. I wonder if Paul will bring his book to the sall-on. Still time to get to Kinkos, Kontonis. (You may remember these little sweethearts from such films as “Uninvisible Man“). The inverse creation/consumption rule applied here… it took about an hour to make and was seen more than a million times. By contrast, my claymation “Butter Attack” took an entire day, and has been seen 50K times.
Do you need a final example of The Law? Scary Maze is my most-viewed video and I spent less time making it than you took reading this post. Gum Tree should be my most popular, even though I’ve probably spent 20 hours on any of my 1000 plus video buried under piles of farts. The law, friends.
Who wants to read thoughtful reactions to literature? I’m guessing David M. Scott has never experienced a mathematical correction from Alexis (apparently “exponential” is not what I think), a bowel joke from Nutcheese or a Reubnick quip. Jan’s probably got a funky political angle. Here’s hoping Marquisdejolie links back one of his bazaar videos, a term I’d use more often but for Maryln. What ya got Punchy, Zack, Coffin, JimmerSD? How about my sisters and bro? They visit. Really.
I got a few notes that the book is in stores, which tells me either:
This isn’t some elaborate prank on me, or a dream.
AdAge called out the biggest YouTube sellouts— those known for sponsored videos for top brands. Naturally my headline would have read “YouTube’s Most Prolific Sponsored Artists” had I been included in the list. For those of you whose nipples don’t get pointy when you hear words like “advertising, marketing, Mad Men, spot, creative brief, storyboards, USP, reach, frequency and single-minded proposition,” AdAge is kinda the Forbes for advertising junkies. It’s like Men’s Health except some straight people read it.
shaycarl t-shirt
The actual article is titled “Meet YouTube’s Most In-Demand Brand Stars,” and it’s a nice representation of the booming webstar, perhaps the central point of “Beyond Viral,” an amazing new book by Wiley & Sons coming out Sept. 21. Despite some conspicuous misses and a few odd inclusions, the article points to some interesting nuggets like MysteryGuitarMan (MGM) preference for a blank creative brief… his videos have never been better, and each one squashes my own confidence more aggressively than the next.
I would have also liked to read a “who’s who” of the companies that link stars with brands (Hitviews, Mekanism, PlaceVine, Howcast, YouTube). That’s something you don’t see covered well, and it’d be fascinating to read about the total market for sponsored videos and the dominant players.
TubeMogul helped compile this list, and you can see the webstar’s vital signs on the TubeMogul marketplace. The stats seem to be out of synch with YouTube’s counter and other sites (TubeMogul has me at 145 million, while YouTube alone counts 161 million…. so my views on Yahoo Video and other sites must be negative 16 million). It could be that once I “private” a video (like those I’ve buried because I no longer like them), I lose Tubemogul credit for them.
Before I could go to bed sulking for being overlooked by AdAge and Tubemogul, I discovered author Irina Slutsky sent me a note about this a week or so. And yeah I missed it. Just like the two e-mail offers to appear on AnnoyingOrange, one of the hottest web series by DaneBoe.
ADHD online-video creator and marketer seeks minimum-wage e-mail account manager from India.
These peeps don’t seem to read my blog, but I consider more than a few of them as friends… Trippy (he’s been in my kids’ bed), Buckley (he spanked me), Penna (wrote the Nalts theme and couldn’t get into bars at early YouTube gathersings), and Shay (he was new, we collabed, then he became twice as big as me overnight… and also got a lot more viewers). Others are more like acquaintances like Justine (who keeps a safe distance, but I made her what she is) and Smosh. Speaking of Smosh, Ian and Anthony get props for the recent Butterfinger Snackers video (“Selling Out”) that spoofed the criticism they’ve taken lately for doing a few too many sponsored videos. Heh. I did a Butterfinger video in 2006, a year before I goofed on this whole sponsored-video space with this video, which mentions Smosh. I’m guessing the Smosh kids never saw this diddy…
It’s me 3 years ago mimicking the emergence YouTube “sell outs” and the personalities who might desperately broker brand/webstar love connections... you know, the entities connecting brands and web stars. Most YouTube webstars know more about engaging an audience than turning a brand strategy into effective and persuasive messaging… so they need help. There are some exception- like Rhett and Link, who could just as well be their own boutique creative agency, as reflected in the quality of their advertainment and the highly unusual ratio of branded to non-sponsored views. I almost like their sponsored videos better than their brand-deficient ones because like a pro athlete they make it look easy.
And, lest I miss mentioning my book (Beyond Viral) in a single post, you’ll find mention of almost all of these cats inside the low-cost pages… including featured sections on Rhett & Link, Charles Trippy, Shay Butler and others.
Hey what ever happened to Buckley? I think he ignored me like Caitlin Hill (thehill88) and iJustine. Maybe Buckley needs an e-mail intern… I wonder if there are any Indians with the name Mason?
Sorry this blog has been dark. I fell asleep for 5 days. Here’s a sneak preview of my book, Beyond Viral. You can preorder it. I already ordered two copies, and plan to give them 5-star ratings that say things like “best book I’ve ever read,” and “I’m buying a copy for everyone on my team.”
Ladies in gentleman, in this seminal post, I shall speak to you not as a video entertainer but as a student of psychology, a practicioner of marketing, and a former magician (age 10). Watch in awe as I explain why our human species has trouble predicting the future, why some of my online-video foresight has been subject to such annoying external factors (not my own failures, of course), and how marketers survive. Then gaze in bewilderment as I change the subject so artfully that you conclude with a round of applause for my genius, and your keen intellect and humor for appreciating it.
As you loyal readers surely know, this blog has periodically devoted itself to predicting the future of online video (see 2006 post), and my soon-to-be-published “Beyond Viral” has a short chapter that attempts some quite risky futurspection*. It may not surprise you that it was the last chapter I wrote, the one I procrastinated the most, and the one that will surely be wrong in as many ways as it’s right.
But you and me? We’re a lot alike in that way. We are all clueless at predicting the future, even though we’re masters at looking back in time to convince ourselves otherwise. We revise history to confirm that we purposely selected the path we stumbled into quite by chance. Ask yourself about the last major change you made (change in job, relationship, geography, etc.). If it was more than a year ago, the reasons you recall justifying it are entirely different from the ones that caused it. By now your psychological white blood cells have attacked that virus of a notion, but let’s move on… Common, drop it I said. Dropppp it. Keep reading. Good boy.
There are, of course, a number of problems our species has with making predictions:
1) We can’t escape “present bias” in making predictions (a subject well explained in Dan Gilbert’s “Stumbling on Happiness“). For instance, in this 1960s futuristic view of today’s technology (video below), you’ll see that both members of the household enjoy the use of “televisions” (not monitors) and hand write communication that is sent from a “post office” in their very homes. What makes this video so humorous, of course, is that it completely overlooks the changes in gender roles. Wife is spending, and husband is busy using his multiple monitors to figure out how to pay for them. Oh, and neither have apparently adjusted their hair for the future.
I encourage you to check out Gilbert’s book if you share my interest in pursuing happiness, spiritual curiosity, amazement with psychology. I believe my next book (yes it’s time already to think about that) will be partially drawing upon Gilbert’s wisdom to provide marketers with new and entertaining ways to manipulate us transparently: let’s call it transmanipulation*. Does that sound odd? Than you haven’t seen my video about why I decided to become a marketer (click to see video about my experience with the $1.25 “flying ghost”).
Where was I? Oh- check out this video and ask yourself why it’s odd. The multiple monitors? The pen reader? The haircuts?
2) We tend to overestimate the short-term changes, and underestimate the long-term ones. (Better put by Naughton in 2008, “THE FIRST Law of Technology says we invariably overestimate the short-term impact of new technologies while underestimating their longer-term effects.” When I began imagining the future of online video in 2006, I expected online-video and television to have merged by now. But I failed to imagine far more interesting things like how we’re slowly beginning to consume more video from our smart phones, and about how television and online video continue to co-exist.
The big stuff creeps up on us like the frog in water that gets slowly hotter (legend has it that he’d jump out immediately if it was boiling to begin with). If you haven’t heard this analogy before, or investigated the flaws in it, then you really need to spend more time with some marketers.
3) Vested interests retard progress. This quote, from a wonderful 1950s article in Popular Mechanics predicting 2000, explains this challenge well. When I imagined integrated online-video and television, I underestimated how the economic interest by cable providers would delay what is readily available. Although ANYONE with moderate income can enjoy online video from their HDTV, few do. That’s because most of us are so lazy or uninformed that we default to the box that Comcast or Verizon sell or rent us. Then we laugh about how our grandmother is still renting a rotary phone from Mah Bell.
Predictions for 2000 (Popular Mechanics, January 1950)
Yes, friends, today’s technology is not entirely driven by possibilities and your preferences and demand. You’ll get what the economy rewards, even if that means you’ll buy your iPhone and iPad and give up Flash. And you’ll switch from one telecommunications provider with great coverage and low prices to another… because your emotional desire for beautiful and prestigious gadgets overrides your logic. Sorry, folks. The brain is the rabbit in the “hare versus turtle” tale. Bet on the heart.
Wait this time I switched subjects by accident not on purpose. But just out of curiosity, did you click the word “retard” in this section’s title?
4) We selectively recall predictions we and others called accurately (and ignore or forget the ones that were wrong unless they were wonderfully and profoundly wrong). This inarguable psychological nuance is the basis for a booming industry of futurists and psychics. Even their victims help their cause, like many Notradamus faithfuls do when selectively interpreting his predictions. But before you feel too proud to be above that, consider why you might visit a psychic… then later recall just a few of the things he/she predicted quite accurately. You know the Pied Piper is manipulating you, but dang that pipe plays a mesmorizingly* attractive tune.
While in 2006 I predicted fairly well the consolidation of online-video sites and the evolution of a network aggregation model (Hulu), I also thought some online-video stars would become television and film stars. Whoops- failed to appreciate that the television/film economy still mostly under estimates or snubs “weblebrities,” and that many have gained more income and larger audiences by NOT being plucked from web obscurity and graced with attention from talent agencies, representatives and producers. I’m also seeing more clearly that what makes a web star (talent, self sufficiency, persistence, social networking, interaction with audience, thick skin, diversity of skills) is quite different from what makes a television or film star (good looks, acting chops, Hollywood network, good timing, the right gene pool, ass kissing).
So why, you ask, am I reflecting on the “problems of predicting the future of online video” (or any crystal ball gazing)? You didn’t ask that, but I made you think you did.
Well its’ pretty simple. I’m using this post as an exercise in addressing cognitive dissonance with public use of rationalization, ego defense and misdirection. But now you think you saw that all along, right? In 2006 I predicted “marketers will get smarter” about online video. And although financial predictions suggest 2011 the space will flourish, I failed big time on that account. As a career marketer, I should have known one thing with certainty. We marketers will not get smarter in a year, or even a dozen years. We’re an impressive group with lots of sizzle, but smarter? So naive I can be.
We marketers lack the balls to sell or the intellect to create something. But we’re psychological masters of that odd space between creating (Beta tapes were good) and selling (VHS tapes were adopted), so we market!
Sure it's snake oil. We both know that. But isn't it fun to pretend it will solve all your problems and make you happy forever?!
And you’ll watch with amazement at our brilliance! Stand with mouths agape as we’re targeting important segments, generating unique consumer insights, identifying real and perceived value propositions, engaging and converting prospects, articulating benefits not features, and (of course) executing flawlessly. Yes you’ll watch our show like first-grade children enjoying their first magic show. Some will see our slight of hands, but all will leave with astonishment and wonder.
I hate to use a blog to solve for this, but everything else including MOTHER GOOGLE has failed me.
I am writing a book, and I want to leverage the text from this blog… three years of crap here. Not too schabby. I can export from WordPress (this blog’s software) into an XML document. But it’s got some errors or can’t easily be turned into text… even with some word editor.
My goal is to pull 400 posts from this blog (that Jan, thank you, has identifies as potential content for the book). Alas, it’s looking like I’m going to have to pay someone to manually do that horrendous job.
Ideally I’d like to export the 400 blog posts from WillVideoForFood.com into a word document that preserves only the title, the copy (perhaps the hyperlinks and date). No comments or photos… sorry backrow.
Damnit I thought that would be easy, but it’s sent me into a spiriling of nothing.
