(You know we mean it because we have a nice shiny "contact us" button)
Often our clients will ask us to make them a viral video. It’s a fun idea and we want to oblige, but the nature of viral videos poses a special challenge. As the name suggests, it’s something that grows exponentially, like a contagious disease. It relies on grassroots and word of mouth marketing enhanced through the connectivity of the Internet. When you think of it that way, it might be easier to build a tree than to artificially manufacture a viral video.
So, when people ask us for one, we usually steer them toward a “quality video” optimized for the web. That means it’s a nice promotional piece that they can show in a meeting, put on television, or run on You Tube. It is, however, a compromise. That doesn’t sit well with us at Advent, so we’ve set out on a quest to quantify the factors that go into a viral video. With any luck, we will figure out how to replicate them on a regular basis.
t’s an ambitious goal, but we think we can do it. I started out with a literature study where I immersed myself in all the scientific studies on viral videos. I learned a lot and I categorized all the videos on You Tube into three main groups: Viral Videos, Opportunistic Videos, Quality Videos. For fun and convenience we know refer to them as vivids, opvids and q-vids.
We already talked about the difference between a vivid and a q-vid. An opvid is one that takes advantage of a popular search that is happening that week, day or even hour. For instance, during the election, you would find a lot of Sarah Palin videos that really just have a photo or two of the erstwhile veep candidate. Still, they got hundreds of thousands of hits.
For now, we’re focusing on vivids, and I would like to announce our first production, Gollum’s Song: I will follow you into Mount Doom. (It’s a parody of Death Cab for Cutie’s I will follow you into the dark.)
Marlin, one of our crazy talented videographers, put this together with his friend in about half an hour. It’s pretty dang funny and it has excellent nerd appeal. It’s been up for about a week and has garnered over 800 views. Not too shabby.
Now the fun part begins. I’m going to start messing with it – stumble campaigns, adwords, blogs (this one included), etc. The goal is to find out when we reach critical mass. I use that term to define the moment when an idea, innovation or vivid gets enough attention that it starts generating it’s own attention.
We will do this with several videos, and eventually we will have a rough idea of the critical mass for a vivid. The implications are exciting. When we figure out that threshold we could create a fun, engaging, possibly viral video and then artificially promote it until it gets critical mass. Voila, a vivid.
Of course, it is still very subjective, but I think critical mass is a key component. In any case, it’s a good first step. In the meantime, check out Gollum’s weird, funny love song.
In just a few short years, websites have become elemental pillars in our business and personal lives. The dot com boom, and subsequent crash, showed that not every crazy idea would pan out in cyberspace. But as a society, we have emerged from that misadventure with a new fundamental technology.
As a business, you must have a web presence even if you do all your sales from a brick and mortar location. Otherwise, people will assume you’re not reputable. What kind of fly-by-night operation doesn’t even have a decent website these days? So while we rely more and more on websites, we still don’t have a good understanding of them.
The best way to better understand websites is to put the technology in perspective. I would argue that our current Internet system and our websites are not the advanced technological wonders that we often perceive them to be. They are old fashioned, rudimentary prototypes of what could be. Complicated – yes. Advanced, intuitive, elegant – not yet.
When Al Gore invented the Internet, it was very similar to when Johannes Gutenberg invented the movable type printing press, except for the fact that Gutenberg really did invent the movable type printing press. At this point, web technology is about two decades old. Compare that to where the printing press was twenty years after Gutenberg invented it? We wouldn’t call that advanced.
And why not? Because only a highly skilled class of specialists could actually use it. The printing press revolutionized the world. People became literate and they became dependent on printers for their books, their information, and their connection to the rest of the world. Despite the reliance on printed matter, however, the common person could not print anything themselves until invention of the typewriter, nearly 300 years later.
It wasn’t until the 1980s that we figured out how to use computers or word processors. Nowadays, most people in America have easy access to desktop publishing. It took over five centuries, but the printing world has finally been democratized enough that it can truly be called intuitive, advanced and elegant.
Websites are a different matter.
The learning curve is faster, that’s for sure. Since the World Wide Web emerged in the 1990s, we have gone from electronic billboards to enthralling, interactive displays with streaming video and sound. Still, we have yet to see the democratization of the website as we have experienced with printing.
It makes me think of Ben Franklin. He was a typesetter, one of the specialized class that knew how to use and manipulate a movable type printing press. If Ben Franklin were around today, he would be a web programmer. On the side, he would have his own website, the Farmers Almanac.com.
So what needs to happen to take web development to the next level? At Advent, we’re trying to move things along a little bit with the democratization of the web. Check out what we’re doing at adventcreative.com. If you’re still not convinced that websites are old fashioned, then read part two.
If you’re ever worked with websites, you will know some Latin:
“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet … “
It’s dummy text, a jumble of Latin words that web developers throw onto pages when they don’t know what their clients want to put in. If the owner of the website had the time and ability to also specialize in web development, he could build his own site and there wouldn’t be any “lorem ipsum dolor” place holders. But he relies upon a highly-skilled group of people, web developers, to do it for him. Since they don’t understand his business, they use dummy text. In some worst case scenarios, the web developers he finds aren’t even highly skilled and Latin text is the least of his worries.
Cicero
So when did people start using “lorem ipsum” dummy text? According to www.lipsum.com, “Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book.”
The printer essentially wanted to show a client what something would look like when it was printed. Having no idea what the client would want to read, he threw in the dummy text – just as web developers around the world use it today.
If his client were skilled enough and had the time to gain the specialized knowledge of typesetting and printing, he could have put in the exact text he wanted from the beginning. Instead, he just got a jumble of Latin that comes from a book Cicero wrote in 45 B.C. And we still get it today with websites.
At Advent, we’re trying to change that. We’re working to revolutionize web development to the point that it is intuitive, advanced and elegant. With our new content management system, Obray, we allow everyday people to directly and safely manipulate the content of their websites without relying on anyone else. Check out the demo here.
We still have a long way to go before websites are no longer as old fashioned as dusty printing presses from the 15th century. Still, we think Obray is a good first step. Soon we hope to let people create their own custom websites from scratch with no programming knowledge at all. We’re trying to bring some democracy to the oligarchy of the World Wide Web. We’ll keep you posted.
The year was 1984, and I was a kid when my parents bought a brand new IBM PC jr. It had a wireless keyboard, two (yes two!) 5.25 floppy drives for quick and convenient game play, and a whopping 128 kb of RAM. We thought we were so cool.
I remember playing an adventure game where I was an @ symbol walking around rooms built with # signs, and fighting S’s. I had to read the text at the bottom to discover that the S was a large snake, and that it was kicking my butt…
Those were good times. The problem was that my little @-character-battles-the-S-adventure-game started to get a little boring, and when we went to the computer store to buy a new game we discovered that IBM PC jr. was not very “PC compatible”. In fact, we had to buy IBM PC Jr. specific games…and there weren’t very many of those.
So now what? Today most computers are upgradeable, and cross compatible so the answer is easier: upgrade the computer, or buy a newer model. And that is the other thing about today…The “buy a new model” concept is pretty mainstream. Back in 1984 my parents thought they were buying an appliance, like our dishwasher or oven, and at $1200 (1984 dollars!) it cost a lot more than the average dishwasher of oven. Those appliances could last for 20 years. So as far as they were concerned, they had made their first and only computer purchase of the 20th century. Sometime in the future, you know, in the year 2000 when we all had hover crafts…then they would need to buy a new computer. (insert some picture of 1950’s version of 2000….with space suits and hovercrafts). But that is today, back in 1984 they decided to wait 7 years to buy a new computer…
…And that is the same mindset that people have with their websites today. People consider their website to be a static thing, purchased once, and then operational for years to come. But websites should be organic, evolving things. The potential of a good website is endless. Amazon, Facebook, Ebay are constantly upgrading their functionality and services. In other words, those websites aren’t even finished yet and they are some of the most established websites on the internet!
So avoid that “appliance” trap with your website. Break your project into phases. This will help on two levels:
Your website project wont get so big and unwieldy that it is crushed under its own weight. I made this mistake the first time I had a website built for a company of mine. We had pages of functions that we wanted. We only needed a fraction of those to go live, but we thought that we needed to get them all built because…well, we were buying an appliance that would last for 20 years, right? Instead, we went through developer after developer as they all got bogged down by our endless scope creep.
Keeping it in phases helps keep a heathly mindset when it comes to websites. A good website is never finished. Only phases get finished.
Wanna be friends?