Comments on: The Radio Today video is nice – but is it truly viral?

By: What Makes a Viral? « Joseph Reaney: Freelance Writer

What Makes a Viral? « Joseph Reaney: Freelance Writer — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 19:24:09 +0000

[...] media strategist Brendan Cooper believes the Today video has done more than enough to qualify as viral. After all, it has been [...]

By: Bears. Who’d have thought, eh? « Brendan Cooper – your friendly social media-savvy freelance copywriter and social media consultant. Or: words make ideas make money.

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 10:53:03 +0000

[...] and it’s pretty cool. I’ve written about viral before – what makes a good viral, and what is not viral. However, it also enables you to participate, which makes it almost totally viral in that you can [...]

By: Everyone needs to think about what they’re doing and saying « Brendan Cooper - your social media-savvy copywriter

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 07:56:19 +0000

[...] The presenter, Ed Stourton, repeated this a couple of times. He must have been rubbing his hands with glee. It could sit alongside Frankenstein foods as a phrase for our times, and it originated on Today. It could spread, much like the virus itself (and unlike the Radio 4 ‘viral’). [...]

By: Should the BBC link more, or think more? « Brendan Cooper, your friendly neighbourhood social media strategist

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 22:28:02 +0000

[...] The Next Big Thing « Brendan Cooper, your friendly neighbourhood social media strategist on The Radio Today video is nice – but is it truly viral?Goodness Gracious, Great Blogs of Fire! » The Buzz Bin on The PR Friendly Index for [...]

By: Measurement Camp, the BBC, and The Next Big Thing « Brendan Cooper, your friendly neighbourhood social media strategist

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 17:31:47 +0000

[...] to ads – I’ve seen it happen myself – but I would like to see how this continues. As with my post on the BBC so-called viral (which has, I just noticed, been quoted on the BBC site but without a link back – nice one, guys) [...]

By: Steve Ellis

Steve Ellis — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 00:07:24 +0000

Nah. Nice job, but it proves nothing.

A Viral grows up from the grassroots. Not as a result of top down carpet bombing via a huge broadcast media spend (or the free equivalent to the Beeb of course).

Can you imagine the social media outrage if Microsoft or Virgin or Unilever had bought equivalent ad spend media spots to promote a ‘viral’?

By: Tuttle the third « Brendan Cooper, your friendly neighbourhood social media strategist

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 18:36:42 +0000

[...] social media strategist on Yahoo Pipes: you’ve got to go there to come backBrendan on The Radio Today video is nice – but is it truly viral?I Am Nostradamus. Am I Nostradamus? I, Nostradamus, am. « Brendan Cooper, your friendly [...]

By: Brendan

Brendan — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 12:21:10 +0000

Here we go: brilliant audio-based mashup-type thing:
http://tubbynerd.com/2009/03/12/890/

Now, *that’s* what I call viral. I just noticed it on my Twitterstream, checked it out on Friendfeed, was blown away. I will most definitely be telling people how awesome this is…

By: Richard Aucock

Richard Aucock — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 20:05:19 +0000

@ Marjk – good point… it would also have carried much more currency had they not mentioned it on R4: let the virality do the work!

By: Brendan

Brendan — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 13:55:36 +0000

A lot of the comments on YouTube are saying it’s not that good.

Considering the challenge thrown out was to do something ‘viral’, I’d say the response has been to produce a video and put it on YouTube, nothing more, simply because these things tend to go viral.

I think a much more powerful way to do this would have been to enable people to produce their own responses or tailor it for themselves.

The Obama viral is awesome. People love adding some of themselves to stuff they see – it’s a sort of screen-mania, just watch people waving at themselves in shop windows where a screen has been rigged to a video camera – and this is a wonderful example.

I wonder if an audio version of this could have been done? The Obama video cleverly avoids actually stating the subject’s name for the precise reason that it’s probably a really hard – if not impossible – thing to do. But it could have been a nice angle, enabling people to insert themselves into a Today news item for example.

Nike have some good examples of enabling people to contribute their own bits which stitch together to provide a whole: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5qpf7dJT8U. Could something similar have been done about how people feel about John Humphrys? Or, heaven forbid, James Naughtie (a thought: if we have to pronounce his name nock-ty, doesn’t that make Evelyn Waugh Evelyn Wok?)

The Mitre pass-it-on is another cute example of this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaWXXvh2t4g), even if it is a pastiche of a Nike original.

So, quality of content? Sometimes something can be so stunningly good, people pass it on, but not necessarily so. There’s credibility in being bad!