Call me late to the game but it wasn't until last night that I came across The Last Exorcism's viral video (the movie itself opened Aug. 27 and has so far grossed $24,772,384, according to BoxOfficeMojo) on Today's Big Thing. If you haven't seen it, it's worth clicking here.
The video was put onto Chatroulette, the website that randomly connects strangers through their webcams (98.7 percent of the strangers are naked adolescent boys looking for naked adolescent girls; the other 1.3 percent are the staff of To Catch a Predator, according to a recent study completely made up by me).
Wanting to get adolescent boys' butts into theater seats for the movie (hopefully, while they're clothed), Lionsgate produced a video that shows a girl getting ready to take off her top before she turns into a possessed-by-the-devil girl. The best reactions were put on YouTube on Aug. 17, where it has scored nearly 3 million hits as of this posting.
While there is no evidence Lionsgate had any help, some trade secrets of what goes into making a video viral were revealed several years ago by Dan Ackerman Greenburg, co-founder of The CoMotion Group, a company specializing in marketing viral videos. Here are just a few of them:
- The concept should not be forced to fit the brand; rather, the brand should be made to fit the concept
- Keep it short, 15 to 30 seconds
- Design it to be remixed, such as the short clip, Dramatic Hamster, which can be added to other people's videos
- Don't make it an outright ad
- Do make it shocking
- If you have a series of videos, release them all at once. "If someone sees our first video and is so intrigued that they want to watch more, why would we make them wait until we post the next one?" says Greenburg
- Use three or four unique tags or keywords to get your video to show up in Youtube's Suggestions module so the user feels as if they've discovered your video themselves.
- If all else fails, use sex, such as Yoga 4 Dudes
