Five Lessons from "Kittens Inspired By Kittens

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Brainfood:
5 Lessons Marketers May Learn from “Kittens Inspired By Kittens”

Copyright ©2009 Fallon Worldwide. All rights reserved.
February 24, 2009

Fallon Brainfood: Trends, ideas, opportunities, and thought
leadership for our brands.

Brainfood is a monthly presentation lead by the Fallon Insight Group.

Where We’ve Been in 2008:
Virtuality // Design For All // China Rising // The Social 10 // The Mobile 10

What’s Next in 2009:
Return of the Hero // Fast-Acting Brands // Generosity // The Dirt on Green
// The Viral Vanguards // The Social Enterprise // Alternate Reality Gaming

Missed previous Brainfoods?
Go to http://www.slideshare.net/group/we-are-fallon

In September 2008,
Fallon’s Executive Creative Director Al Kelly
posted to YouTube an innocuous video entitled,
“Kittens Inspired By Kittens.”


Five months later a groundswell ensued, seemingly overnight.

• 4,762,374 Video views across
YouTube and Yahool Video
• 95,000 Blog mentions
• 6,400 Tweets
• 1.5MM Google Search citations
• 28 Traditional News mentions

Source: Google Blog Search, BlogPulse, VidMetrix.com, TweetVolume.com

What might marketers learn from the “Kittens…” phenomenon?


In this Brainfood session:

We’ll Discuss
Five Lessons To Apply When Developing Conversational Ideas for Our Brands

By Dissecting

The Forensics of a Conversational Idea:
What happened that enabled the “Kittens…” success?

And Separating

Strategy from Serendipity

Rally your networks
Lesson 1: “Thundercats, Ho!”


The “Kittens” video posted in September 2008, but it was on the
evening of February 8, 2009, when Al Kelly began “working his
networks” that views began to soar.

Feb 9, 2009


Among Al’s 800+ Facebook friends—mostly ad industry
professionals—some friends whispered in the ears
of influential bloggers.

40K Visitors Daily

1.3MM Visitors Monthly

571,891 Visitors Monthly

Those influential bloggers drove the early awareness and views
of the video. The groundswell was ignited.

Fueled +18K views

Fueled +50K views

Fueled +16K views


Implications of “Thundercats, Ho!”:
Never underestimate the power of the network.

≥ View your corporate organization as a network.
(Could be 10. Could be 1,000. Could be 1,000,000.)

≥ View every individual in the organization as a network to tap into and then
figure out ways to tap into these individual networks.

≥ Consider it the obligation of everyone in the organization to nurture their
networks and tap into them when a groundswell needs to happen.

≥ Outreach to bloggers and influentials beyond your network, too.

Lesson 2: Take Me, Please
Enable “slippyness” of your contents


YouTube’s “slippy” embed code was replicated and reposted on
700+ blogs, thus rendering the entire Web a “macrosite” host for
the video.

Source: VidMetrix and Youtube Insights

On Twitter an echo chamber effect ensued. The result was almost
6,500 re-tweets of the “Kittens Inspired By Kittens” meme and link.


@RainnWilson endorsed the video to his Twitter fanbase of +96K,
who re-tweeted and catapulted the meme to #3 “most discussed”
on Twitter in a single night.

Rainn Wilson aka
Dwight Schrute of
NBC’s The Office

Source: Twitter Search

Implications of Take Me Please: You never know where the social
media fire may get lit, so be generous with the matches.

e
Enabl
≥ Encourage theft of your idea.

≥ Build ideas that play well in “slippy” content venues (like YouTube, Twitter,
and Facebook).

≥ Allow people to steal liberally to echo your content on your behalf.

≥ Be promiscuous. Get beyond your microsites.


Lesson 3: Talk To “Strangers”
Embrace the Social Web’s fringes


Social media groundswells tend to bubble up from the fringes and
ripple outward to the mainstreams.


Groundswells then echo back from the mainstreams throughout
conversational channels like Twitter with even more velocity.


Over 50 user-generated mash-ups sprouted. “New news” was
garnered daily creating over 319K views, which renewed interest
and views of the original video.
Source: Vidmetrix, YouTube


Implications of Talk to Strangers: Recognize that the new
influencers at The Social are the nerds, the weirdos, and the
fringe elements who command the attention of millions.

≥ Get beyond your comfortable industry cohorts.

≥ The most influential communities dance on the thin line of moral decency,
correct spelling, and good taste—and this is why they’re popular!

≥ Celebrate and showcase the mash-ups and imitations. They love you, man, so
love ’em back.

≥ Loosen up, dude. Really.


Silly Stupid
4. Be Interesting. utrageous
O
Weird
Embrace your edges


Let’s just be honest. This video is freakin’ weird! Cute. But weird.

And weird is exactly why we love it!

The Implications of Be Interesting: The Social does not celebrate
the bland or the grey. Go bold or go home.

≥ At The Social, “interesting” often translates to: “silly,” “stupid,” “weird,”
or “outrageous.”

≥ But, corporations tend to be more comfortable with the “witty” or “humorous,”
rather than the “stupid” or “weird.”

≥ Stop taking yourself so seriously, Dude.

≥ If you want conversation about your brand, then give folks something

to talk about.

Lesson 5. Perfectly Imperfect
Widen our classic standards of perfection


Decades of TV commercial production trained us to maniacally
pursue glossy perfection. On YouTube, people don't necessarily
care about our gloss.

In fact, the raw imperfections make this video endearing, fresh,
and vital.

Implications of Perfectly Imperfect: Web audiences sometimes
forgive and expect some imperfections in exchange for
timeliness, authenticity and Beta technology.

≥ At The Social, “perfect” can sometimes be “imperfect” by traditional TV
standards

≥ Perhaps less energy on a single overly produced quot;perfectquot; idea that may fail at
The Social…

≥ …And more energy on enabling the idea’s dispersion, the idea’s timeliness, and
the beta testing of more social ideas.

≥ Building a winning conversational idea for The Social is more art than science
- fail fast(er), fail cheap(er) - then optimize.

≥ Bad ideas aren't made any better because they’re built expensively.

Some actionable lessons to apply to our brand ideas:

1. “Thundercats, Ho!” Rally your networks

2. Take Me Please Enable “slippyness” of your contents

3. Talk To “Strangers” Embrace the Social Web’s fringes

4. Be Interesting Embrace your edges

5. Perfectly Imperfect

Widen our classic standards of perfection

Let’s continue the conversation on our blog.

Share ideas that inspire. FALLON PLANNERS (and co-conspirators) are
freely invited to post trends, commentary, obscure ephemera, and
insightful rants regarding the experience of branding.

http://fallontrendpoint.blogspot.com

Five Lessons from "Kittens Inspired By Kittens

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