Viral Videos – A New Angle with the New Year

We all know that content remains the primary element in helping a video go viral.  If your content is engaging, and likely to appeal to a broad audience group (maybe even global!)  the greater potential for it to go viral.  Great examples are  the Pink Glove Dance or the Wedding Dance that are racking up views and comments that would make any sage on Madison Avenue proud.

However, as we entered a new year, I discovered another option to help your message go viral: personalization. The process is actually quite simple (but very effective!):

BC Children's Hospital Video with my name of the screen!

A quick, easy-to-fill form on your  website enables users to submit the name(s) of the person(s) and their email address(es) to whom they want to send the video. The names are then passed through a URL parameter that goes on to populate text placed within the video. While this may not sound that exciting, it is very effective  with ingenious use  of fonts and placement.

Check out this one from the BC Children’s Hospital. It makes a very clever use of the televsion news format to help its audience spread their message for donations. It should not be surprise that the Obama campaign was not too far behind on picking up on this trick either. In fact,  I would say they were really creative with the use of font and placement for their holiday greetings.

Happy Holidays from the Prez himself! 😉

Note, this process of going viral is slightly different. While, admittedly it may not have the broad appeal such as the content-driven examples mentioned earlier, the purposes is slightly different. These videos can be  more effective within your target audience and help leverage the networks of your existing audience base to expand the spread of a very specific message.

So hit up you Flash developers and check out what options you have of including personalized videos in your communications.  You do not have to wait for the next holiday season – any milestone that is landmark within your stakeholder community can be a great reason to create such a video message.