Science and art of viral videos

Abstract

Today, Facebook has 1.9 billion unique monthly users, with Indians topping the list, Instagram has 500 million monthly active users, and it won’t be an exaggeration to say that a combined figure of 2.8 billion users are engaged in one of the social media platforms. With these social platforms becoming one of the best ways to reach out to this huge audience, it becomes imperative for marketers to stand out in the humongous pool of content. One would have spent millions on a social media campaign, but content as amateur as a video of a 2-year-old baby playing with a cat comes out of nowhere and takes the crowd for a ride. Popular examples are trash doves, Gangnam style and Kolaveri Di. Through this project, we intend to gather a better understanding of this phenomenon of a certain social media content becoming viral, sometimes to the level of annoyance. Today, “going viral" refers to the tendency of an image, video, website or piece of information to be circulated rapidly and widely from one Internet user to another via email or online media. Viral marketing refers to the phenomenon in which consumers of content share and spread marketing information, initiated by marketers to leverage WOM behaviors (Lans et al., 2010). Viral marketing can be captioned as electronic WOM (eWOM) concept (Bampo et al., 2008). However, viral marketing has a competitive edge over traditional WOM in the sense that it costs lower, has high credibility, diffuses faster , and has better targeting (Bampo et al. , 2008).1 A viral video is any clip that spreads rapidly through online sharing. Why some particular types of videos become viral depends on a number of factors. The videos could go viral unintentionally or intentionally. But “Is there a pattern to what goes viral?” is the question we will try to answer. First we will take a look at what literature says and present our findings. The rest of the paper is organized in the following manner: First we will talk about our secondary research and how it helped us to create a survey and analyse youtube content. We will focus on viral videos and the various parameters that affect their virality. Then we will look at the managerial implications on viral marketing.