Seven Secrets of a Successful Viral

Rajagopal Menon, COO, Contests2win.com
Virals seem to be the flavor of the season. Alootechie’s request for an article on the same seemed to be Godsent to get my thoughts in order. Over the past few months, we’ve been churning out virals for some of the top brands in India. Most of my ramblings are distilled from the learning that c2w has had with our viral marketing campaigns. So here goes.

KISS – keep it simple and short

A good viral should revolve around a simple idea. If animated, it should have good production values with a strong script, great art, fantastic sound including a good voice over and special effects. The cardinal rule is to keep it short – as much as possible, avoid going over 120 seconds. Anything longer risks losing consumers because of short attention span of netizens or bad internet connections.

Bollywood works, cricket rules

Most successful virals have revolved around timeless Bollywood themes. Sholay, Deewar and even Rajnikant are the staple diet for most viral marketers. Such virals are safe bets – they have a reference to context and the trick is to have twist in tale.
href=www.betaNo1.com works because it is a spoof of one of the many bollywood movies from the 70s. The hero and his ailing mother are easily identifiable, the humor tongue in cheek and the brand fit perfect.

Be different

Regular mass media brand communication cannot be slapped on the internet. Virals should not be just animations but also have to engage users. Be different by, for example, getting users to contribute. Mobile phones and digicams are becoming all pervading. Leverage them to get consumers hooked on.
For Valentine’s day, we created a microsite, www.coupleno1.com that lets users contribute. Consumers had to upload a photograph with one’s better half and stand to win not only the title of Couple No. 1 but also upto Rs 15,000 in cash.
Ray-Ban’s recent Never Hide campaign promises the consumer 15 seconds of fame by displaying your photo in your Ray-Bans in Times Square.

Seeding the viral is important

There is no doubting that netizens just love to share stuff. The cooler stuff you share, the higher you go on the cool quotient ranking of your friends. But gone are the days when you forward a mail to ten guys and expect the whole world to see it. You need to seed the viral to a critical mass of people – also you need to use blogs, social media, message boards, sms's, cell phones. Social Networking sites (like: MySpace & Orkut), Social Sharing sites (like: YouTube) and Social Bookmarking sites (like: Digg) have made it relatively easier to reach out to a wide audience. All virals are regularly promoted on c2w.com using banners, mailshots and contesting properties.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=n5xIii2CugE, the c2w take on the entire bad umpiring controversy that surrounded the India-Australia test series was posted on Youtube.

Don’t expect a “Hit” every time

All of us know that the best dotcom brands have been built exclusively on virals. In most viral campaigns, no one expects a brand to pop up in the end, which makes it successful. As brands start exploiting the platform, the lesser the chances of the same audience “viralling” it. Also remember, we can never track the number of times the viral was forwarded – in most cases, we can only track the number of views or plays.

Video is the future

The internet is evolving and so are consumer’s expectations with regard to content. They are exposed to the very best from across the internet and expect the same from Indian companies. Even traditional contesting platforms are evolving – c2w created a property called Web Charades which is the internet version of Dumb Charades. Consumer can guess the name of the movie that the model is “enacting” by using the usual Dumb Charades clues. All this happens in Video – not in the usual illustrated or animated formats.

http://www.contests2win.com/hangman/5655/Web-Charades-Watch-this-video-clue-guess-the-movie One of the latest viral marketing videos is the Quiksilver dynamite surfing viral - a youth is seen throwing a stick of dynamite into a lake, creating a giant wave so his friend can go surfing. The 80 second video ends with the brand logo for Quiksilver, a brand of surfing clothes. The grainy footage appears to have been apparently captured on a mobile phone camera but in reality was shot on high-definition cameras and digitally altered later to look as if it had come from a mobile phone camera.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xfBNxNds0Q Lastly the ultimate secret to making a really successful viral video?

Be Dumb. Really Really Dumb.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WALIARHHLII

Enjoy!!