“Youtube, Myspace, viral videos and BMW.”

If you are not in the Internet “know”, like most of us, here are a few more web words to toss into causal conversation. YouTube, MySpace and viral video.

Viral video is more the definition of a type of video that is spread across the web. It tends to be low-resolution video captured often with camera phones or digital still cameras with video capture features.

Viral video is also a host of other high-quality rebroadcasts of videos that are “buzz” worthy and net-centric. For example if George Bush had tripped, grabbed Tony Blair’s butt and CNN caught every squeezing second, that video would undoubtedly be a top viral video download. Now this type of thing will still have lots of competition from the Mentos-Diet-Coke-rocket videos that pervade these sites and are scarily popular.. So when it comes to viral you can literally see that there is everything, yes that means everything, being posted and once it is up, people love to weigh in one what they think of it.

So YouTube and MySpace have become the Internet hub broadcasters and even rebroadcasters of these types of videos. They are user driven websites that create these communities of friends and fans. Comments, combatants, blogs and chatgroups create these unique and very popular sites for sharing video. MacLuhan would be all over this new form of communication.

Viral videos are also shared via email and often sent to cell phones to share with friends. I would say that this will evolve very quickly and the new spam will be pseudo viral videos that show up in your inbox (it’s probably happening now).

I don’t think this is all bad though. The speed and acceptance for this type of communication is already at a record pace. Feature length films like Nuovi Comizi D’amore (New Love Meetings) are now being created with only camera phones. Large companies like BMW set the bar very high with their “Hire Film” series (started in 2001) that created a series of films specifically for the Internet that had to feature the BMW brand and products. They used top Hollywood directors and renowned actors. But they were entertaining and people loved to watch them.

So how can you use it?

First off is to understand the medium this will be viewed. Small screen sizes, fast downloads and easy play-ability are critical factors to take into affect for your video to be effective.

Here’s a simple example of corporate viral video use. You have a new product or offer that you want to send to all you clients. Instead of sending out a brochure or phone call, you make a creative short video profiling it and email it to them. It could even be embedding in the story itself versus being the main feature as a type of heightened product placement. Or, if you think that emailing would be too intrusive, you could post it on your website and just email them a link.

If you want to look really hip, you could do what I saw in a recent television ad for a teen dance movie (Step Up). They created a MySpace site for the movie that hosted trailers and other press materials. Being a MySpace site, it enabled online comments and the offer to become part of Step Up’s friends and thus each “friend” gets a bit of reciprocal self-promotion. Using a MySpace site you could work tie-ins with clients who want to promote themselves on your site using this method.

You could even develop this into a mini-net series tha people would have to come back to your site and see the next segment. This could also cross-reference into a video podcast and so on. It’s dizzying sometimes, but that’s the net.

One last note about the use of viral video; be entertaining. Even though the BMW series and the Mentos-Diet-Coke-rocket videos are on radically different ends of the production value spectrum, they are both interesting to watch. Everyone loves a good story.

CM


www.cmcreative.ca