Over the past decade, the advent of online video hosting and social media has opened up the potential for anybody to reach an audience in the millions. But effectively engaging with a viewership with ever-changing tastes, moods and attention spans remains an incredibly difficult process. So what works when trying to reach the online world? And perhaps more importantly, what doesn’t?

We’ve had a long and exciting engagement with the online community across a variety of platforms for the past decade, beginning with a little short film that went viral across the world to a crowd-funding campaign that was featured in TIME Magazine and lead to a development deal with 20th Century Fox in the USA – all from our offices here in Melbourne. As I discuss in an interview here, all you need is a good idea, a clear message, the right means of delivering it to your audience, and a dash of good fortune and timing.

Our first short film back in 2006 was an experiment more than anything else. Could we make something for $200 and get someone… anyone… to watch it? It might be hard to imagine now, but back in 2006 when we first uploaded Black Button to YouTube, the online video sharing site was still in its relative infancy. We’d shot the film in a day on the theatre stage of our old school and most of the budget went on pizza for the volunteer cast and crew. We submitted to a few film festivals and were summarily rejected, so what did we have to lose by placing it online? At the very least, it was an easier and cheaper method of sharing the film with family and friends than burning DVDs!

In the first week, we were thrilled to have nearly a hundred views, explaining them away as the aforementioned family and friends. The next week, a thousand. We explained that as those family and friends sharing it to others. A week later, 10,000. The growth now seemed inexplicably exponential. At the time, even the term ‘viral’ was not in common parlance, but it was clear the video was being passed around well beyond our immediate circle. One quiet day a week later we awoke to nearly 1,500 emails. Overnight, the editor of YouTube had discovered it and placed it on what was then the one and only, worldwide ‘front page’ for YouTube, where a mere 10 videos appeared a week. We instantly had exceeded the combined viewership of the largest short film festival in the world, Tropfest, in 6 hours. Today the film continues to be viewed and is just shy of 2,000,000 unique views from all around the globe. It has been nominated for various awards, including ‘Best Film on YouTube’.  Above all, it opened our eyes to the possibility of the online audience.

We used this ‘internet fame’ to assemble a team from around the world to make a 22 minute animated comedy called Wentworth & Buxbury. We were lucky enough to screen at the New York Television Festival where the show won the award for Best Writing. 

Whilst working on a variety of TV programs down here in Australia, we chipped away at a new project made for the online world, called The Weatherman. Through a combination of targeted social media campaigning, reaching out to the subscriber base we had reached out to since those early Black Button days and the good will of people from around the world, The Weatherman became the World’s First Crowd-Funded TV series, appearing in TIME Magazine, Forbes and The Australian. Finally, it reached the desks of 20th Century Fox where it was consequently optioned for development, as featured in The Hollywood Reporter.

This unlikely journey had its beginnings in the simple act of reaching out to the online world and seeing if anyone was watching. There were many lessons along the way, including many mistakes. What we’ve learned about online audiences across a range of demographics is information you can apply to your own brand, personal or corporate. Brands with successful online presences consistently perform better than those without, and there are innumerable examples of relatively inexpensive viral campaigns having far greater impact than expensive traditional modes of audience targeting.

So, what exactly have we learned? Well, with the caveat that each attempt to reach an online audience will undoubtedly possess its own set of unique circumstances, nuances, and appropriate strategies, we’ve found the following three rules to ring true across a number of different platforms.

Rule #1: Content is King.

You can have the best marketing team on earth armed with a thoroughly researched distribution plan, demographic studies and a targeted advertising spend – but all of this will do precisely zero good if your content isn’t up to scratch.

For all the mysticism surrounding viral videos, the mechanism by which they gather their astronomical viewcount remains very simple: they are continually shared and re-posted by their audience. Reaching out to and effectively engaging an audience remains the key ingredient in achieving video virality – and the thing that matters most in engaging that audience is the content itself. Highly original and creative content which is appealing enough for its audience to want to share is the fundamental goal in any viral campaign.

Even niche audiences can generate hundreds of thousands of views when delivered content that appeals to them. Our silly little parody of the Hitler biopic, ‘Downfall’, re-subtitled to critique the local Australian Football League team of the year, delivered upwards of 300,000 views in a month and was featured on national TV – and all because of insightful, original and humourous content that its audience thought worthy of sharing.

So it’s about finding that ‘share-factor’. What people share is often a reflection of what they want people to see them as. If we find something funny, or inspiring, or moving, it gives us pleasure in being ‘the one who found it’. It motivates us to pass it on, to post it, to in some way share in the light the content has made by being its discoverer. Every person is their own TV network in this day and age, so create content people want to ‘broadcast’.

Rule #2: Don’t just entertain – engage.

Though this might sound contradictory to the story of Black Button, where we essentially let the video spread itself, that was 2006. In 2015, audiences are under constant bombardment from all angles in the online space, and if you’re going to compete for a fraction of their time and attention, you had better be willing to ‘meet’ with them on their level. Passive sharing is no longer an option. Be humble but enthusiastic about your content, answer questions, pose questions yourself, take onboard constructive criticism, share your plans for future content. In a word – communicate.

Rule #3: Have a distribution plan.

Finally, it pays to have an idea of how to reach your audience, specifically. A thorough understanding of content aggregators like Reddit, a plan for reaching various topic-relevant blogs and commentators, and a knowledge of how to reach the specific audience you’re trying to engage will put you in much better stead than just blindly uploading to YouTube and waiting for the views to roll in.

Our silly Hitler re-subtitling parody above garnered the bulk of its early viewcount from AFL-based forum BigFooty, where we initially embedded the video link. Whilst only responsible for a couple of thousand views directly, the shares generated by these valuable initial hits drove the popularity of the video over the following weeks. Likewise, Black Button was sent to several blogs debating the theological dilemma at the heart of the film – blogs drive an incredible amount of traffic, and a clever plan to reach them can generate important early views, shares and re-posts. So don’t just know who your audience is, know where they are. 

 

If you think we can help you manage your brand in the online space or help you create viral content, we’d love the chance to talk with you. Please contact us if you’d like to know more.