David Fisher : What is Noise Blog

I’m a fan (or maybe it’s what I hate it when people make me play) of Buzzword Bingo. That’s where you’re sitting in a meeting, conference, classroom, presentation, or maybe just on Twitter and you’re being flooded by Buzzwords. Buzzwords are generally meant to try to show that you’ve “got it” and that you’re on top of the newest trend. They are made in a poor attempt to try to make an old concept new, and thus inject marketing dollars into it, or get something sold.

The one that grinds my gears the most is “Viral”. “Omg, we’re about to launch a viral video”, someone might say. The moment someone says that, you should quickly cover your ears, or at least stop paying attention to that person. On the internet viral actually means this: Something that has unexpectedly spread due to people sharing it with others in a rapid way, generally going past a certain tipping point and becoming an epidemic, where nearly everyone says, “yea, I’ve seen that”.

Let’s look over this again:

1. Unexpected- Unless someone is damn good, and there are less than .0001% of you out there that are that good, you can’t “make” your video go viral. You can try to seed it in the right places, but unless its something people really love and need to share its not going to spread. The curve should go up for views, not spike and then fall off the face of the earth. Every damn video your company puts out will not be viral. Soulja Boy’s main “Crank That” videos have gone viral. The rest of his stuff just gets a lot of views. If you can actually consistently make viral videos, then you’ve probably been getting 7 figure paychecks for it in the past year, and no one knows what you actually do because you don’t want to spoil the secret. It is nearly impossible to conceptualize in your head what the internet will take and run with. When you watched what we know now as the “Rick Roll” in the 80’s, when it was just a music video did you think, “OMG THIS IS VIRAL?”. No you didn’t. You can’t figure it out. Stop trying.
2. Rapid- Just getting a lot of views slowly over time doesn’t do it. Once people catch onto it, it needs to spread like wildfire. This often involves 4Chan picking it up, it hitting the front page of Digg, and it getting reposted to a few hundred if not a few thousand forum posts. Janet Jackson’s boob falling out was viral. Within 24 hours, the entire world knew exactly what she had under that costume.
3. Tipping Point- If a few thousand people see it, that’s great, but it doesn’t make it viral. The internet is huge these days. If you aren’t hitting hundreds of thousands of views in the “rapid” stage, then you likely again are missing viral.
4. Everyone’s seen it- I don’t think anyone who was on the Internet in the late 90’s didn’t see the hamster dance, then you probably weren’t actually on the internet.

Viral videos often turn into memes of some sort if they are really on-key and accepted by the internet.

So what are your videos if not viral?

• Popular- Just because people watch the Presidental Debates didn’t make them viral. People sent them around, sure. They weren’t viral.
• Funny- Don’t confuse every funny video with viral. It’s just not it. The joke that you thought of and told your mom in 4th grade might have been funny, but it wasn’t viral.
• Promotional- There’s a good chance that this video is promoting you, your company, or your product. Sometimes this will get spread around
• Well Promoted- So you just got 30,000 views of your video after blasting it out to twitter and having dozens of people make best attempts to distribute it. Then it falls off the face of the earth. Guess what? Not viral. You just promoted the hell out of it. What’s why it got views. If it was so good on its own merit, it wouldn’t have needed that.

In short, the internet takes care of viral for us. It acts as a hive mind and distributes it for you. Sure, there’s tricks you can do, promotions you can make, but what you’ve done at that point is promote something well, not create something that went viral.

Having a “viral video” isn’t the only mark of success. Your video can serve its purpose without being viral. Not being viral doesn’t mean you’ve failed (unless that was your goal), or made a bad video. There’s probably a few hundred actual viral videos every year at best. Yours just doesn’t happen to be one of them.Viral isn’t always good in fact. The “Motrin Moms” ad recently went viral. I don’t think it had the same effect that they had intended.

Instead, try making a video with a purpose and content, that isn’t intended to be viral. Maybe it will become viral on its own.

I came across Weezer’s new video this morning. It’s basically the ROFLCon of Weezer music videos. While sadly there aren’t any people in the video or mocked in the video that were actually at ROFLCon (maybe a good list for next year?) there were plenty of memes to be seen.

Check it out:

Thanks to Julia Roy, who was kinda enough to invite me to Seesmic… I now have an account (private pre-alpha currently). This site is beyond slick. I want to hire their designers. If they write in Python… I just might.

Seesmic is a direct-to-web video blog recording site. Yea, you can do it kinda on Youtube too, but this is better, cleaner, and smoother. Much faster and less junk. I like. Videos coming soon. My account name on there is just ‘david’. I’m slowly letting go of Tibbon, and finally becoming a bit more professional. Either that or my business cards need to say Tibbon.

Maybe this isn’t a new thought, but has anyone considered that maybe, just made the CIA is releasing with a specific timing, or even creating/editing the videos that are from “Bin Laden”. There’s almost always some speculation that the tapes are fake, but the real point of them is the impact of the videos, not who made them.

The impact of the videos is to embolden the fear that well, the Boogieman is out there. The people who will think/believe that, regardless of what is said otherwise, will buy into the fear from the tapes no matter what. Just as the lie that Iraq/Iran had anything to do with 9/11 is believed anyway, the Bush supporters have their doublethink hats on.

They know that Bin Laden is, or should easily, be dead by now. They also know/think that the CIA has various tools for manipulating video. This most recent video it’s obviously edited. The video cuts away whenever a specific event or date is mentioned, leading me to think that it’s very doctored. Asides from the fact that the only copies i can get my hands on are from low quality websites, I’d love to take a listen in closely and see if there’s any ‘oddities’ in the audio.

Not saying it’s for sure, but one of the purposes of the CIA (as stated in their charter and website) is to distribute propaganda. Just a thought. Could it be true? Maybe. Likely? Hard to say.