This document discusses the concept of viral media and strategies used by successful organizations. It begins by looking at the emergence of "virality" in tech companies. It then draws on Am I Hot or Not? as an example of a company that took advantage of social growth strategies. Each user bringing in another user helped the site grow rapidly from just a few people to millions of daily users within a short period of time. The document cautions that while social media strategies can work well, they also carry risks if not implemented properly.

1. Viral Media:
Forward/Embed/Share/Play
MAC309
robert.jewitt@sunderland.ac.uk
http://twitter.com/rob_jewitt

2. In this session I‟d like to look at one of the emergent trends coming out of the
tech space. This session is going to be considering some of the ways in which
brands and companies have tried to engage with users in order to establish
themselves.

3. 1 3
2 4
In (1) I‟ll look at the emergence of „virality‟ in recent tech success stories. In (2)
I‟ll draw on a specific example of a viral business. In (3) I‟ll look at some of the
risks involved with social media before looking at why certain videos go viral in
(4)

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2 4
I want to illustrate section (1) by drawing on an idea coined recently by Adam
Penenberg, something he calls a viral loop

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„Viral expansion loops‟
Adam L. Penenberg (2009) identified a number of successful organisations who
incorporated virality into their functionality so that each user begets another
user.

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Click to play videos
Play video

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The value of your social network?
Penenberg‟s book has a Facebook application that measures the value of your
social network, by working out how well connected you are. A case of you are
what you share, measured in dollars. A viral tool to spread his message (ie.
“buy my book”) across the popular network

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The value of your social network?
Oh, and there‟s also an iPhone app. But it‟s not available in the UK…
“It just goes to show that marketing a book ain't what it used to be” (Penenberg,
2009)

9. When something online is free,
you‟re not the customer, you‟re the
product.

10. When something online is free,
you‟re not the customer, you‟re the
product.

11. From a Google perspective, you're not the
customer. The ad service buyer is the
customer. You're the commodity. By
making you a more attractive commodity,
i.e. by making sure to only serve you an
ad if you are in the target population for it,
they are making the ads pay better for
their customers, and they can reap a
large part of the difference to their
competitors, the other ad services
- Liorean, 2004

12. Perhaps because you're not the
customer any more. You're simply a
"resource" to be managed for profit …
Who is the customer? Not you, whose
life is reduced to someone else's
salable, searchable, investigatable
data. The customer is everyone who
wishes to own a piece of your life.
- Claire Woolfe, 1999

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“Viral strategies aren‟t strictly for businesses. They are also seeping into other
arenas – like politics. And no one was more successful in imprinting a viral loop
into a campaign than Barack Obama” (Penenberg, 2009: 14). Obama raised
$55 million online by Feb 2008 without attending a single fundraiser

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“One of my fundamental beliefs from my days as a community organizer is that
real change comes from the bottom up … And there‟s no more powerful tool for
grassroots organizing than the Internet” (Wired, 2009). my.BarackObama.com
(aka “MyBo”) was the technological driver of that change.

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2 4
Now in section (2), still drawing on Penenberg, I‟ll explain how a viral success
story emerged using Am I Hot Or Not? as an example of a organisation which
took advantage of a socially orientated growth strategy.

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Am I Hot or Not?
In October 2000, James Hong and Jim Young were discussing a woman that
Young described as the „perfect 10‟. They had the idea of applying a metric to
people‟s looks by getting people to vote on pictures in order to establish a

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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
✓
Most people are a….?

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Am I Hot or Not? Day 1
October 9th: Hong emailed 42 people the site link. He went to a nearby software
call centre (TellMe) and mentioned it to an officer worker there. Within 10 mins
the IP address for TellMe was logged and it multiplied as officer workers shared
the link

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Am I Hot or Not? Day 1
By the end of the day the site had received 37,000 unique views while 200
photos had been uploaded

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Hot or Not? Day 2
100,000+ unique visitors. Hong estimated the cost for bandwidth at the present
rate of growth to be $150,000 per year. Popularity came with a real cost as
people passed on the site address to their friends

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Am I Hot or Not? Day 3
Salon.com reporter Janelle Brown called in a story based on the site‟s success
after a venture capitalists passed on a viral email with a link. It was described
as„nothing more than a virtual meat market‟yet„indescribably horrible … and yet
utterly addictive‟

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Scalability
In order to offset costs decided to host the photos on Yahoo‟s Geocities and the
site on a cheap 400-mghz Celeron PC under a desk in Berkeley. By 5am the
server had been down for 2 hours. The Dean of the engineering department
complained the traffic was pulling the entire network down. They were
struggling to stay in control of their rapid growth

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Lots of media attention, but still no plan for monetisation. They were getting
more notoriety and more traffic. By day 8 the site was getting 1.8 million page
views per day. Agreed a deal with Rackspace servers who wanted to boost their
presence/reputation

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Within 6 weeks the site had 3 million page views, was hosting 3000 photos.
However, there was still no clear funding model. The site predated Google‟s
AdSense service for automated advertisements.

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The site faced a number of problems as it grew and funding was being sought.
Several users were uploading pornographic content that wouldn‟t sit well with
potential advertisers. Initially Hong‟s parents moderated images but they soon
turned to the community to keep the service free of shocking images

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Within 2 months the site had counted 7 million page views per day making it
one of the top 25 domains online. They had collected 130,000 photos and had
generated $100,000 in ad revenue

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The site received Cease & Desist letter from racier Am I Hot site after Howard
Stern mispronounced the name on air. They changed the name to Hot or Not.
The dot-com bubble burst meant that ad revenue dried up

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Meet Me?
The best way to take advantage of all their regular users was to give them the
option of meeting up. By April 2001 they introduced a $6 per month fee for the
functionality which generated $25,000 in revenue by the end of the first month
($60,000 by year end)

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www.hotornot.com

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Hot or Not? Definitely Hot
The pair rejected a $2m offer from search engine Lycos. By 2004 the site was
generating $4m. In July 2006 the site registered its 13th billionth vote and was
the third most popular dating site on the Internet. By 2008 they sold it for $20m.

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1
2
4
8
16
Users beget users
Pyramid scheme
Chain letters?
Sharing key to success

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Hotmail Twitter
eBay Flickr
PayPal Blippy
MySpace FarmVille
YouTube
Gmail
Facebook
Digg Skype
LinkedIn Zynga
Etsy
Recent viral success stories?

33. Uploaded to Vimeo 20th Feb 2012. Uploaded to YouTube 2 March
2012.
As of 29th March 2012 each site has had 17.7 million and 85.9

34. 17th March :Jason Russell of Invisible Children is detained by
police for public nudity , making sexual gestures

35. 35
„Viral expansion loops‟
Recap: Penenberg (2009) identified a number of successful organisations who
incorporated virality into their functionality so that each user begets another
user. An effective social strategy in which a brand‟s proposition can be easily
disseminated is key, but not everyone gets that right.

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2 4
In section (3) I‟ll look at how putting social media at the forefront can be a risky
strategy for some organisations, despite the advantages that can come with
being well known.

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Play video
Not all brands benefit from the social strategies of other companies as
Kryptonite found out when their expensive bicycle locks found themselves the
subject of some unwanted attention

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Play video
When Nestle decided to embrace the power of social media it found itself at the
centre of an argument with its fans – namely it decided to police the use of its logo
across Facebook. The reason Nestle were so sensitive to their logo‟s appropriation
by fans, failing to see this as a compliment, was the video Greenpeace made about

39. 39
Play video
When Andrey Ternovskiy created Chatroulette so strangers could meet other
random strangers online it quickly became a hot topic of conversation amongst
the tech savvy. When a piano player named Merton record his encounters with
strangers and share that on YouTube the service became even more infamous
picking up 8+ million views

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Play video
It even spawned a series of imitators including a recreation of the original by
professional musician Ben Folds live at a gig in front of an audience in
Charlotte, North Carolina

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2 4
In this final section (4) I‟ll look at the key factors behind a number of recent
successful viral videos

42. Web video (powered by Google for free!) has given any one of the us the
chance to be famous by giving us the power to get our messages across.

43. 72+ hours of video uploaded every minute!
3 hours of video every minute from mobile
devices
< TINY tiny tiny % of videos have 1 million+
views
Web video (powered by Google for free!) has given any one of the us the
chance to be famous by giving us the power to get our messages across. But
how can we be successful against such odds? What are the key factors in
securing success in a crowded space?

44. Are you a tastemaker?

45. Play video

46. Yosemite Mountain Bear didn‟t set out to create a viral video. He just wanted to
share the amazing thing he‟d just seen

48. tastemakers

50. This video had been around a while before it‟s viral success. Originally
uploaded in early February 2011, but saw a spike in traffic around mid-March.
Why? Well, it was Friday, but a group of influential tastemakers shared this with
a wider group of friends (eg Tosh.O, Michael J. Nelson from MST tweeted about
it, bloggers, etc) and a community grew up around this inside joke.

51. Saturday Sunday Monday
Tuesday Wednesday Thursday
> 10,000 parodies exist!

52. participation

53. Nyan cat! Viewed 83+ million times!

54. Even cats watched this video…

55. Cats even watched other cats watching this video…

56. Cats even watched other cats watching other cats watching this video…

57. What‟s significant is that the original video inspired a number of creative spin-
offs. There were many different remixes with international themes. A mash-up
community emerged off the back of a silly joke, but what‟s crucial was that
anyone cold participate in it.

58. randomness

59. Who could have predicated any of this? Nobody. But the ability to share
something quickly, for it to gain traction in noticeable ways, before being
amplified throughout communities looking for unexpected things. These
elements are key to the success of viral media.

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Social
One of the key aspects of features of viral success stories is the emphasis
being placed on their social dimensions. By enabling products to be easily
shared, embedded or passed on, they take advantage of the human drive for
sociability.

67. There are, of course, dangers associated with this new found power to share,
remix and recirculate digital content. Just ask Jessi Slaughter or Star Wars
Kid… Digital technology and the internet are powerful tools and with power

68. 68
• # - C!..., 2010, Share
• # - @Hella, 2008, Obama
• # - Sergio Vaiani, 2009, Scale Stairs
• # - Mike Zienowicz, 2007, Joe
• # - MissNatalie, 2008, Miss Natalie’s Growth Chart
• # - GDS Infographics, 2010, The Year the Dot-Com Bubble Burst
• # - Phil Hatchard, 2010, Sketchbook 2: Internet Dating
• # - kurtxia, 2008, Space invaders
• # - bitchcakesny, 2008, Weight Watchers Awards
• # - Jun Acullador, 2007, Gulf Air
• # - plien, 2009, Z4 dash
• # - DORONKO, 2010, NIKE +iPod
• # – nan palmero, 2010, Foursquare Pins and Tattoos SXSW 2010
• # - yoyolabellut, 2010, Space Invader @ Paris (France)
• # - paulszym, 2010, Step 10 – Place the 5mm Sensor for soldering
• # - Nina Leen (LIFE), 1964, B F Skinner training a rat
• # - yoyolabellut, 2010, Space Invader @ Paris (France)
• # - A. Diez Herrero, 2007, creative commons -Franz Patzig-
All attempts made to attribute sources but if I‟m missed one, get in touch please