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You’ve heard the buzz. You’ve seen the videos. Now it’s time to create your own YouTube masterpiece. The marketing potential is huge. As you’ve seen in my other posts, a good viral marketing video can generate millions of eyeballs.

For the past couple of days I’ve been doing a lot of research on this subject. I’ve summarized my findings on Whamwiki.com. On the wiki, you’ll also be able to add your own tips, tricks, and secrets to the list I’ve just created. That’s the beauty of a wiki.

View list

Not only is this an example of a great viral marketing video, but it’s also a clever way of demonstrating how difficult it can be for marketers to achieve awareness.

If you’re planning to release a viral marketing idea into the webisphere, you should check to see if your campaign passes my four simple rules of viral marketing.

1. Simple to Understand - if you can’t describe the concept in one sentence, it’s probably not going to work.
2. Simple to Use - keep it dead simple for the user to use - life is complicated enough.
3. Simple to Find - seed your viral marketing campaign (blogs, emails, ads, websites, etc) and make it easy to find.
4. Simple to Share - make it easy for people to tell others.

If your campaign can accomplish these four simple things, your viral marketing idea has a much better chance of being click worthy.

After looking at hundreds of viral videos, microsites, emails, and services, I started to notice several patterns.

Here’s a list of the most common benefits/incentives that make people want to share a viral idea:

1. Benefit in Numbers - To personally benefit from the product you need to sign up other people. More people the bigger the benefit (e.g. Skype).
2. Competition - This usually involves challenging someone to a game (e.g. can you top my score).
3. Entertain Others - Make other people laugh…the louder, the better.
4. Influencer- Allows you to become the leader of the pack. Spreading the message will help build your reputation as an influencer or leader (the more you influence, the more powerful you become).
5. Social Needs - Desire to be part of the herd or share an experience.
6. Fear - Motivation based on fear of death, illness, isolation, shame, etc.
7. Knowledge Gap - A situation is created where the visitor has to invite people to fill in gaps in her/his knowledge. Family history is a good example of this.
8. Financial Gain - Commission, free samples, bribes…you get the picture.
9. Entertain Yourself- Ability to surprise, trick, scare or embarrass someone.
10. Ultruism - Help friends just because it’s the right thing to do. It gives you that warm fuzzy feeling.
11. Cause-Driven- These campaigns are centred around a cause or charity. Sharing them with other people makes us feel like we’re helping someone and that other people identify with our plight.

I’ve also posted this on a marketing wiki called Whamwiki.com. If you’d like to expand the list, simply visit the wiki and post your additions.

And hey, why not use reason 4 or 10 to share this article with your friends and colleagues (wink wink, nudge nudge).

Photo credit: Grant Neufeld

Last June I reported on how MTV hired a couple of YouTube celebrities to promote their global warming campaign. This celebrity-on-a-budget approach is slowly starting to catch on.

According to adrants.com, the Philippine Department of Tourism recently hired HappySlip, a YouTube celeb, to promote Philippine tourism to second- and third-gen Filipino-Americans.

What I love about this pairing is that it makes sense. HappySlip is a Filipino-American. As a result, her videos are sincere and touching. Here is HappySlip’s sentimental arrival video.

I was going to write a long article on why companies should explore Facebook for their next viral marketing project. Luckily, Monica Hamburg from “Me Like the Interweb” blog beat me to the punch.

Check out her great article…and don’t forget to create a Facebook page for your business!

After everything is said and done, viral marketing is not about microsites and YouTube videos. It’s about finding and sharing something truly unique or remarkable.

In the spirit of all its past innovations, Apple is now taking on the bland banner ad. Although it’s not the first time they’ve employeed this technique, this witty execution was disruptive enough to get my attention. In TBWA’s latest creation, Apple’s loveable PC character reaches into another banner ad to pasts a “NOT” at the end of it.

This interaction between two separate ads has proven to be a unique enough idea that it has attracted a lot of buzz on the web. Well done Apple.

(via Ad Freak)

There are a lot of eye tracking studies out there. Based on these studies, virtualhosting.com has assembled 23 great tips for marketers to use. It’s definitely worth a click.

If you do a quick search on Youtube for Post-it Notes, you’ll find a large collection of videos where people are using Post-it Notes to orchestrate pranks. I don’t know if some of these videos are the work of a marketing department; however, as a viral marketing concept, there’s a number of things I like about it:

1. The fun nature of these videos translate into a favorable brand image.
2. It has the potential to inspire others to do their own prank.
3. It’s easy to do.
4. After completing a prank, people might want to post it on the web.
5. It encourages people to use up a lot of Post-It Notes.
6. They’re interesting enough to watch that YouTube visitors might share them with their friends…or post it on their blog.

It would be great if 3M had a Post-It prank contest to display and encourage all this creativity.

See more pranks.

Just ran across a great article from the creator of the Obama Girl video (viewed over 100 million times). Ben Relles, the author, shares some guidelines & tips on how to create successful viral videos for political campaigns.

In addition, Ben revealed an interesting fact about viewership: 70% of “views” for their videos occur within the first week of airing.