I’m live blogging key talks from Social Media Marketing 2013. Finally today, it’s Barney Worfolk-Smith from Unruly Media, talking about social video. Hoping for some great insights. Keep refreshing this page for updates.
Unruly Media have produced the viral video chart since 2006 and Barney kicks off by talking about what they’ve learnt. The bottom line is, you can buy a view, you can’t buy a share. We don’t tend to use the word viral because that suggests randomness, which is pretty pointless if you’re a marketer. We prefer the term “social” video. Shares are currency in the social economy.
Unruly Media is founded by academics and we thought it important to have some scientific data-driven research to back up the findings of our chart, so we took six years of data and used it to publish Viral Marketing: The Science of Sharing. The book’s seven tips for success:
1. Make it emotional. Videos that elicit a strong emotional response are twice as likely to be shared.
2. Be positive. Videos which provide a strong positive response are 30 per cent more likely to be shared than those which provoke negative emotions. Shock or anger can drive shares but they’re a risky bet.
3. Ignore the device. No creative device drives sharing than any other, with the exception of personal triumph. So focus on emotions, not creative devices.
4. Don’t use hard sell. The average branded video takes 30 seconds to reveal the brand.There is no correlation between shareability and level of branding.
5. Don’t over-invest in content and under invest in distribution. No matter how shareable a video is, a larger viewer base delivers more sharing. A video that is seen by few cannot be shared by many.
6. Strong positive emotions get your video shared and remembered. Exhilaration is the most successful trigger with 65 per cent recall. Second strongest is hilarity (but difficult to get right).
7. Quality reach is key. To build market share, reach light and medium buyers outside of your owned channels.
Emotional campaigns are more profitable than rational campaigns – but this will be subject of Unruly’s next book. As an end of the day sweetener we get to see two videos where hilarity has rated highly. The audience here voted for LG’s Ultra Reality HD prank but Barney would have preferred it if we chose PooPourri’s Girls Don’t Poop. You can click through to watch both!
Photo thanks: Unruly Media
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