Working in an agency, and being in the leading social media team in Asia Pacific, there are a few common questions that I always get. “How to make my video viral” is one of the most popular ones that comes up all the time, clients even tried to pay us for a “formula” to make things viral. I’m about to give you the answer, for free, which might not answer your question.

The word “viral video”

I was in a discussion with Thomas Crampton and John Stauffer few weeks ago about viral videos, they both made a really good point about how people slowly think that “viral video” is a noun or a category of video, videos that get easily spread around the Internet. Truth is it’s the other way around, they are called viral videos because they went viral, not because they were produced viral. “Viral” is the adjective used to describe a video that went popular.

My Formula

I don’t have the formula to create viral effect, no one does. Videos don’t go viral by luck, but no one can promise “viralness” before it happens. It’s like parents wanting their child to be the world’s champion for swimming, they could do whatever to try, spend tons of money to get the best trainer in the world, but the trainer can not say that he’s training a “World’s Champion Child” until he actually becomes the world champion.

Although I don’t have a formula…

Below are some of the important elements I found in previous videos that went viral for your reference:

Unexpected (but at the same time viewers can relate to their daily lives): Popcorn with Cellphones

Extremely Cute: Bob Marley Baby

Extremely Funny: The Sneezing Baby Panda

Doing certain things that viewers can’t/ wouldn’t do: Will it Blend

Stealing fame: Re: @aplusk | Old Spice

Cool or sexy or Environmental – helping viewers to reflect the personalities they want to become: Agent Provocateur

The favorite girlfriend

A man can have multiple girlfriends, but there’s always a favorite one or the wife who they want to (or have to) pay most attention to. This man would try his best to satisfy this one woman, he would put this woman in the centre and make plans around her. This woman is just like the biggest client in an agency that the team has to make sure they deliver the most out of all the clients.

Timing

Guys with multiple girlfriends (especially the married ones) have to have the best time management skill. Time slots have to be perfectly planned otherwise they won’t get to see any of the girlfriends. Getting too many girlfriends without a proper “project” management strategy will also easily end up with breakups. Similar working in marketing agency, too much client work without a good workflow system might end up getting nothing done. Greatest marketing agencies are not the most creative ones, they are the ones that can make the creative ideas happen.

Dating ideas

When a guy try to make plans with one of his girlfriends, he would make sure the locations don’t overlap with where the other girlfriends usually go, at the same time they would try to recycle the ideas/ lines they use. Just like how agencies try to leverage on existing work/ content while they have to avoid executing similar ideas on different clients.

Memories and Lies

Guys with multiple girlfriends need to have great memory skills too, they need to remember every girlfriend’s personality, favorite color and favorite food without mixing up with other girlfriends, just like marketing agencies having good client servicing and manage to learn all details and project progresses of all clients.

Pitch

There are also moments when the woman meet another guy. Similar happens when agencies try to pitch a client and the client is not convinced, the agency would go, “Is there another agency?”

GlobalWebIndex has recently launched a free tool that allows users to quickly get a snapshot of their data on social media insights, this free tool was built based around the data they have gathered from Wave 2 database from January 2010. The latest data, Wave 3 from July 2009 is only available for GlobalWebIndex clients.

This tool comes very handy when you are looking to create quick slides with valuable data that gives brief understanding of online behavior for specific group of people from different regions.

I tried to embed the tool to this blog post but I failed to adjust the size of it.

Start playing with the tool now

This is the question that most Digital Marketers have thought about. In a recent research by Sherastone, only 2 digital marketing “tactics” had increased in budget in 2009; they are email and social media.

Social Media is NOT killing Email Marketing

I don’t think email marketing is dying. I think marketers need to really see social media as a strategy, and email marketing can be one of the “social media marketing tactics” when they are integrated well.

To give, not to sell through email

For example, social media as a whole is a great channel to collect relevant email addresses because it allows us to target personalities and interests through conversations, the key to be successful in email marketing is to provide value to the subscribers. Instead of thinking about what they might be interested in purchasing, marketers should think about what they might be interested in receiving. Instead of following the Direct Marketing nature of Email Marketing, marketers should use it more as a branding and community building tactic that goes hand in hand with social media.

Although measuring is way more complicated than direct marketing, there are still ways to do it with well-planned KPIs.

Email “Selling” is Dead

Direct email marketing (email selling) is dead, people don’t just “purchase” after seeing email promotions. However, with the help of social media, email marketing can still be a very powerful and profitable tactic when the message and execution is tailored to the target.

Parody in advertising can gain more attention than the original piece if it’s done well. This piece definitely went viral. Specsavers, an online glasses shop created this great viral piece that mocks an older advertisement by AXE. AXE has always been selling sex appeal in their ads, Specsavers’ ad is clever enough to take advantage of all the buzz AXE has.

The original Ad by AXE

And here’s the Specsavers’ ad

I’ve seen more and more local success by adopting social media to local SMEs, although what they do are rather tactical and advertising focused, they started to see more and more value from social media. According to a recent study by Small Business Success Index, small businesses has doubled their social media adoption from 12% in 2008 to 24% in 2009.

Many Small Biz just want to “be on it”

Leading ways small businesses are using social media include:

• 75% have a company page on a social networking site.
• 61% use social media for identifying and attracting new customers.
• 57% have built a network through a site like LinkedIn.
• 45% expect social media to be profitable in the next 12 months.

They don’t like to spend time on it

Small businesses have a number of concerns about social media, including:

• 50% say it takes more time than expected.
• 17% say social media lets people criticize their company on the internet.
• Only 6% say social media use has hurt the company more than helped it.

Other Findings

• Company web sites are a top technology investment in the next two years, with small businesses either adding new features/functionality to their existing Web sites or building one from scratch.
• The ability to showcase their products and services online to attract new customers is second in the hierarchy of technology investments small business owners plan to make in the next two years.
• Social media investments rank third in small business investments to be made in the next two years.

Oscars Academy Awards have finally ended, after all the buzz on the Internet, it’s time to round it up and see what the buzz was all about. Social media was actually a big part of Oscar, it actually predicted some of the results.

Key findings from this research:

• There are 389955 unique conversations on social media in the past 7 days (March 1st – 8th)
• In the past 7 days, 505987146 Twitter users are exposed to a Tweet about Oscar
• More blogs talked about Oscar than other channels until Twitter took over 4 hours before Oscar began
• There are 98735 unique Twitter users tweeted about Oscar when it’s happening
• Brazilian Loves Twitter, 7.5% of the Oscar related conversations online are from Brazil
• Portuguese (17.3%) and Spanish (10.5%) are the most popular languages on Oscar topics after English (68%)
• Overall, Twitter is the most popular channel for Oscar related topics (Discussions from Facebook private profiles are not included)
• Before Oscar began, more people talked about Kathryn Bigelow (59.80%) than James Cameron (40.20%) online
• Avatar still had a bigger buzz (54.80%) than The Hurt Locker (45.20%)
• Up was most talked about among other nominees in Best Animated Feature Film

Research Keywords: “Oscar AND movie”, “Oscar AND film”, “Oscar AND director”, Oscar AND Actor”, “Oscar AND Actress”, “Oscar AND award”, “Oscar AND (James Cameron)”, “Oscar AND (Kathryn Bigelow)”, “Oscar AND Avatar”, “Oscar AND (Hurt Hunter)”, “Oscar AND (Up AND Movie)”, “Oscar AND (Fantastic Mr.Fox)”, “Oscar AND (Secret of Kells)”, “Oscar AND (Princess and the Frog)”.

Photo Credit: Reuters

Me and the the 3 special guests at Tweetup

[Show as slideshow]

Thanks everyone for attending the Tweetup from last Tuesday (March 2nd), also hope our 3 guests Brian Giesen, Tom Smith and Jenny Armshaw-Heak had fun. More than 20 people joined the tweetup and I’m glad most of us had a chance to meet each others. Would also like to thank the venue sponsor RED SoHo and @GeoffTwitchen for arranging the “Tweetup Corner” for us!

I will be hosting my 2nd tweetup of 2010 on March 2nd. This tweetup is going to be a little different from the previous ones, we will have 2 special guests (actually 3) this time.

Brian Giesen

@bdgiesen is my colleague in Ogilvy who’s based in Sydney Australia,  he’s is an award-winning, founding member of Ogilvy’s 360 Degree Digital Influence group and passionate word of mouth marketing practitioner. Brian is extremely experienced in the field, he will be in Hong Kong for one night and we will be lucky enough to have him in the tweetup. (Here’s his bio)

Tom Smith

Tom Smith (@tomtrendstream) is the founder of a technology and social media trend research company Trendstream. He’s also the project leader of the Global Web Index and created Wave @ Universal McCann. He will be in Hong Kong for the FutureWebAsia Event for the Asia launch of Global Web Index. Tom will also come along with another speaker from the event, Jenny Armshaw-Heak (@globalwebasia), who’s the Business Development Director of Lightspeed Research.

Join Us!

Venue Sponsor: RED SoHo (2/f, Kinwick Centre, 32 Hollywood Road, SoHo Central)

Date: Tuesday, March 2nd 2010

Time: 8pm

Admission: Free  (drinks not included)

Register Here: http://twtvite.com/ixvugx

Space is limited, registration is required, please secure your place now!

Dansk Port Teknik (DPT), garage door company recently worked with agency JWT Copenhagen this creative advertisement that really takes the most out of Toyota’s recall. This ad promotes 20% off on all garage doors, for Toyota owners only along with the broken garage door.

Marketing/ advertising industry is often cruel. It’s been only a week, Toyota loses more than $20 billion in market share and recalls couple million cars, companies have already published ads making laughs of their mistakes to generate sales.