In the aftermath of the Agency.com fiasco, there has been a lot of talk about what makes a video viral. Where did Agency.com go wrong? Well, first off it wasn’t funny, nor interesting. It was just stupid and boring. Let’s take a look at a couple videos that are much more interesting or funny.

One of the top videos on YouTube was they “Hey” video. Basically a couple attractive girls that made their own video to the old Pixies song. This video became the YouTube signature video. So much so that Kevin Smith did a parody of the video when he releases his own YouTube video. What makes this video viral? It was funny, people liked the song, and the girls were cute. And it showed a little more work than most of the video going on the site. They “hey” video has over 8 million views on YouTube alone.

Another extremely popular video online is the Matt Harding video “Dancing”. In this video, Matt Harding has taken video clips of him dancing all over the world. Looking at the video comments, people found it to be inspiring, funny, and “art”. the video became so popular that the people at Stride long-lasting gum (free link for their efforts), sponsored a second trip around the world to film more. When people want to know what YouTube is about, this is the video I send them to. This video is popular because people find it interesting and inspiring.

In my last post about the Agnecy.com Subway video, I mentioned a video that I think did viral right. The Barats and Bereta video for Windward Reports. This video was funny and incredibly entertaining. It resulted in millions of views accross the Web. I would like to have seen more mention of the clients product or service, but it was pretty damn good.

And as I mentioned in my last posting, Jim Coudal at Coudal Partners knows how to make a funny, viral video.

I think they thing to take away here is that your video has to be different, interesting, and either funny or inspiring. It also appears that music doesn’t hurt. I think the main problem with Agency.com’s Subway video is that they assumed because most of the viral videos are shot in low quality, and not very well scriptied, that they could do that. The difference is talent, which Agency.com showed the world they are very much lacking. Obviously Jim Coudal has talent, but I would imagine that he wouldn’t actually put himself as the star of a client’s video meant to be viral. These YouTube celebs, to quote Steve Jobs, think different. It’s doubtful that if Subway was approached with the Hey video, or something like it, they would have thought it was a good example of viral.

One last note on being viral. Make it brief. Most of these videos are under 4 minutes.

Next week I’ll post about how to distribute your video to make it popular.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 8th, 2006 at 10:47 amand is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.