Last week I posted an interview with online video experts and Internetainers Rhett and Link. One of the topics they discussed has stayed with me the last few days.
The idea of "viral video" is one of the more mythic topics of the online marketing world. When marketers say "viral" they really mean "magical", "mystical", or "spontaneous". Those words don't sound professional though. We marketers know it would be silly to tell our boss we're going to create a "magical video". That wouldn't fly. Viral video seems to have been the term that works. The trouble with this is that "viral" anything almost never happens.
Viral Almost Never Happens
As Rhett and Link noted, truly viral videos are accidental successes. Viral videos weren't created with the intention of going viral. They were filmed and just happened to go viral after the fact.
This isn't to say that videos with a lot of planning and intention can't succeed. They just won't really be viral. They're filmed with the intention of generating a lot of traffic on the hope that people will talk about it and pass the links along. That's not viral. That's "passalongable".
Some videos are more passalongable than others. Rhett and Link make some highly passalongable videos. So did Oren Lavie on his recent music video. Cadbury's done it too. OkGo is one of the best.
You get the idea. These were intentionally created to appeal to people so they would pass them along. They succeeded. It looks like viral, but it isn't. They're just highly passalongable.
You and I will probably never create a viral video. If we do, we won't even know it until it's already happened. We can, however, try our best be create things that are passalongable. That's a worthy goal. Just don't mistake of trying to go viral. Instead, create a video, blog post, or magazine advertisement for that matter, that's passalongable. It's all about adding value to people you want to reach to the point that it's so good, they just have to tell someone else about it. Heck, maybe you'll even deem this post passalongable.