RonAmok!

I’ve noticed a disturbing trend recently. My clients who are new to “online video” frequently call it by another name: “viral video,” as in “We want to create a viral video.”

Your New Media Evangelist has nothing against the word by itself, but when placed before the word “video,” both my systolic and diastolic blood pressure measurements increase significantly.

The phrase creates a distortion field that inhibits a communicator’s ability to focus, frequently putting them into a delusional state of believing that they’re the next Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino, or Tim Street.

I’m begging you. For the love of all that’s holy, please eliminate the phrase “viral video” from your pre-production vocabulary. Trust me, the phrase will drain all of your budget and leave you with moving pictures that your kids will call “lame.”

Instead of trying to manufacture million of downloads, try creating useful videos that tell good stories. If millions of people just happen to forward that video to all of their friends, then I’ll consider lifting my embargo. But not before.

A video’s virality can only be determined AFTER it is released.

Tags: viral video viral embargo eliminate ronamok ronploof New Media Evangelist

On October 22, 2008, I was sitting in a popular session at the MarketingProfs Digital Mixer, hosted by the legendary CC Chapman. CC’s topic focused on the corporate use of online video — something I recapped in a cleverly-named post: CC Chapman on Online Video

At the end of the session, a woman asked how a pharmaceutical company like the one she worked for could use online video. She understood how it could be used for business-to-consumer applications. She understood how companies who sold business-to-business could use it. Her question was how to use video in an industry that was regulated by the Food and Drug administration (FDA).

As a New Media Evangelist who helps companies tell their stories online, I run into this question constantly. If it’s not the FDA and the pharmaceutical industry, it’s FINRA for the financial industry, or the FTC for publicly traded companies.

So I went on a quest. My goal was to find a company who works in a regulated industry yet was using New/Social Media successfully. What I found was more than I could have expected.

I found Johnson & Johnson, a 123 year old, $64 billion holding company that had not only been using YouTube successfully, but that it had two blogs, Kilmer House and JNJ BTW, a Twitter account, and was experimenting with a Facebook Group. And as I studied the series of events that transpired to enable this success, I stumbled upon a road map that any company can use to develop its Social Media strategy.

Here I present the results of my research in my latest e-book:

Johnson & Johnson Does New Media

The e-book is licensed under Creative Commons, so please feel free to pass it around!

Although it may appear that celebrities get hoards of “instant” followers whenever the sign up for services like Twitter, the phenomenon is a byproduct of hard work done long BEFORE they opened that new channel. Celebrities spend their entire careers building a fan base, and they know that those fans will “follow” them wherever they go. This post takes a look at some of the things that companies can learn from those who are experimenting with a new way to interact with their fans.

The first part of any New/Social Media strategy is to create compelling content that draws an audience–an effort that takes time. Celebrities like Oprah, Ellen, or Shaq, don’t have this lead-time problem. Since they can mobilize their existing fan base quickly, they can skip over the “building an audience” phase and go straight to the “interacting with the audience” phase.

A couple months ago, your New Media Evangelist described how Shaquille O’Neil interacts with his audience through Random Acts of Shaqness. Recently, I witnessed another one.

On May 27th, my Tweetdeck/Twitscoop window displayed two words looming large: “Kirstie” and “Alley.” At first I feared that something terrible had happened to the actress who I’d come to know as a neurotic barkeep on the television show Cheers. Thankfully, however, instead of reading of her untimely demise, I found that @kirstiealley was in the middle of a Twitter experiment with her then 28,838 followers.

CONTEST:$300 PRIZE. FILL IN THE BLANK. A “DAY IN THE LIFE SHOW” OF KIRSTIE ALLEY..SHOULD BE CALLED————— GOOOO!!!!

At 9:50 a.m., exactly 53 minutes after posting the challenge, she announced the winning entry:

@Boomstone AND THE WINNER IS….”DON’T CALL ME KRISTIE” YAYYYYYYYYYYYY tough call (a few versions of this so went verbatum) yayyyyyyy

• $300 per new show title?
• 15 cents per entry?
• 37.7 entries per minute?

So, what are you asking of your audience?

Kistie Alley Shaq Oprah Ellen Twitscoop audience chris brogan ron ploof