Can You Mean to Make a Meme? Viral Video and the Secrets of Being Seen

For the past couple of months, I’ve been posting articles about the process of storytelling. I’ve been focused on the building blocks of stories and thinking about ways to get the “story” in storytelling right. But storytelling marketing needs to do more than just tell a good story. It needs to make sure the story gets heard. So, today I want to talk a little bit more about the ins and outs of being seen.

We’ve all heard of something “going viral” on the internet. Oftentimes, the content in question is a video. It might be something funny or it might be connected to an important cause. But whatever the goals of the video’s creators, it quickly goes beyond their network and ends up a public interest story on the nightly news. They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity. But is going viral a good goal?

At Argonaut Productions, we work with mission-driven organizations to help them tell their stories through video. We’ve seen video projects make a major impact on brand recognition, fundraising campaigns, and volunteer recruiting. Some of our videos have put up some pretty big numbers but we try not to get caught up in vanity metrics. At the end of the day, it’s the results that matter.

Is it an either/or choice? Do you have to choose effective or popular? If you choose to go for popular as a goal, can you plan a video that goes viral? Are there any downsides to a video going viral?

In this article, I’m going to look at the concept of memetics. It’s central to the way we think about digital media as viral phenomena. I’ll work through the good, the bad, and the unbelievable of the media landscape. Then I’ll take a closer look at viral videos and ask whether video storytelling and “going viral” can work together or not.

?What Is Memetics?

The term memetics was coined by Richard Dawkins in the 1970s. He was studying the ways that human cultures and individual ideas replicate and mutate in a manner that is both similar to and different from genetic evolution.?

It’s important to pin down the starting point of this conversation because initially, it was much broader than the narrow sense of internet memes that we’re most familiar with today. In the Science of Discworld series that I’ve referenced in my other articles, authors Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart, and Jack Cohen suggest that memetics can apply to the establishment of religions, economic theories, and political philosophies.?

Depending on the scope of your survey, you could say that the Catholic church was a meme that went viral or you could talk about the Ice Bucket Challenge. It’s safe to say that anyone working in marketing would be happy to get results that compare with either of these examples. But that begs the question. How did they happen? And how can we learn from them?

Critiquing Viral Media

If “meme” references the idea and “going viral” refers to how that idea spreads, then we need to keep track of a few different ideas as we examine the question of how to be seen in the digital world.?

First, there is the idea itself.?

Does it matter whether it’s a good idea or not?

Next, there’s the dissemination of the idea.

Once an idea is “out there” we surrender our control over what it does. How does that factor into the process of making messages?

Finally, there’s the matter of the media we use to get our ideas in front of audiences.

Does the medium trump the message?

The relationship between the idea itself and the spread of that idea through an audience is a question of rhetorical effectiveness.?

Plato

At the dawn of western culture, Plato expressed serious concerns about how things were going to work out for us. Out of all the issues that he addressed, rhetoric and democracy stand out as his most common foils.?

He wrote about how rhetoric made people believe they knew the truth while philosophy offered the harder road that led to knowledge. He wrote about democracy as a popularity contest when politics should put wisdom over popularity.?

We don’t have to agree with everything Plato had to say to take advantage of his warning that the popularity of an idea says nothing about the quality of that idea.

Simulacra

Fast forward a few centuries from Plato’s day and we find media criticism trying to untangle a world where audiences receive news and marketing through the same channels. The press is the fourth estate but it shares channels with and competes against consumer marketing and mass-mediated entertainment.

The Philosopher, Jean Baudrillard, famously argued that the first Gulf War did not take place. There’s only so much real-world value that you can get from post-modernism. But I think there’s some value in Baudrillard’s concept of simulacra, the idea that symbols replace reality with representation.?

Is a symbol always a replacement? Can it, instead, be a referent? These are important questions about the relationship between an idea, the message that is meant to spread the idea, and the audience in which the idea spreads.

Hot and Cool

For Baudrillard, the relationship between simulacra and video was similar to the idea that a cigarette is a nicotine delivery system. His work sought to warn people about the harm that was done when simple symbols replaced complex ideas and reached us through mediums that promoted passive reception.

Marshall McLuhan was another media theorist that thought a lot about how different media shape messages and impact audiences. He believed that photography, video, and television had a viral advantage. McLuhan argued that “hot” media overwhelmed one of the audience’s senses and led to minimal participation. In contrast, “cool” media engages multiple senses and invites a great deal of interaction.

Plato and Baudrillard both worried that making messages audiences like would lead to a world where entertainment won out over information and message makers could manipulate audiences. McLuhan gives us a set of questions about whether that is really what’s going on in any given example of a viral video.

The Three-Body Problem

So far, we’ve established that memetics and viral video involves questions about the message, the medium, and the audience.

For modern marketers, these questions bear on the ethics and effectiveness of the work that we do.?

Are viral videos simulacra or “mere rhetoric” that dupe audiences into passive consumption? Or, could a viral video engage an audience’s senses, invite participation, serve as referents rather than replacements, and lead to wise action or real knowledge?

The honest answer is not either/or but both/and. Most viral videos are consumed passively and lead to nothing more than vanity metrics for the people who produce them. At the same time, examples like the Ice Bucket Challenge show us that “going viral” can be a good thing.

Viral Videos

So, to bring everything back to the big picture, let’s take a minute to remind ourselves of what we’re up to here. As people who work in marketing and messaging, we want to know how to be seen more by creating content that audiences watch, like, share, respond to, and interact with.

Viral videos are a great example of content that achieves those goals. But we want to know whether we risk sacrificing the real value at the heart of our messages for the sake of making shiny objects that grab people’s attention.

The internet in general, and YouTube specifically, have made it easier than ever to create and post video content where it can be seen by millions of users every day. But more than half of the videos posted on the platform have fewer than 500 views.?

Let’s look at the different categories of video content that are most likely to go viral. It’s as good a place to start as any when considering whether you can say what you want to say, the way you want to say it and still hold open the possibility of catching lightning in a bottle when the audience gets involved.

Accidentally Viral Videos

This category would include the videos of bloopers, embarrassing moments, and unintentionally funny or entertaining events that end up making the rounds on the internet. You could script an “accident” to create content with the hope that it goes viral, but the wisdom of internet crowds is usually pretty good at separating the wheat from the chaff in this category.

This category isn’t completely useless to organizations that want to use video marketing to reach a broader audience. An “accidental” moment that people can relate to, might go viral on social media and lead broader audiences back to your organization’s site or social media channels. If you’re positioned to take advantage of that fleeting attention, it can turn into a catalyst for real impact.

Entertaining Videos

This category includes videos whose sole purpose is to entertain an audience. Often, they’re humorous but that’s not always the case. The young musician Nandi Bushell has turned herself into a household name posting videos of her playing along to popular songs.

An entertaining video is a prime example of content marketing. You don’t worry about trying to squeeze in a sales pitch, a call to action, or information about your services or products. You do it just for the audience. The goal is to get on the audience’s radar so that they find their way to your call to action on their own.

Conversion Marketing

We’ve all seen plenty of examples of video sales letters, pitch snippets on social media, and other video content that’s meant to start or finish a sale. The formula for how to do this effectively is pretty standardized. But creativity and style go a long way to separating the winners from the losers in this competition.

It’s rare to see a marketing message that’s meant to go viral and generate sales hit the mark on both measures. But the ones that do change everything for the organizations that put them out.

Cause Marketing

I’ve already mentioned the Ice Bucket Challenge a few times in this article. I think it’s a great example of a meme that goes viral and a great counter-example of Plato’s and Baudrillard’s theories about what that involves.

As a marketing message, the challenge broke the mold of passive video consumption by challenging viewers to act, then share the challenge so that others would act as well.

Should Viral Be Your Goal?

At Argonaut, we work with our clients to help them discover, design, and deliver a brand story that will amplify their mission. When we start a project, we’re not looking to create content that is built to “go viral”. Still, within every long-form video story we produce, some moments distill and encapsulate a dramatic demonstration of proof.

When you create a video that tells the whole story, you’ve got a video that’s going to do a good job of securing connections to an audience. But getting the audience’s attention is still a challenge that has to be overcome. A 30-second snippet of the video posted to a social media channel can be just the thing to make that happen.

We don’t promise our clients that their videos will go viral. We don’t even recommend that they set “going viral” as a goal. We advise our clients to tell the right story and tell it the right way. When you do that, you lay a foundation. If you have the foundation in place, you can branch out in ways that reach different and broader audiences without sacrificing the message in the process.

That’s not to say that we don’t want to do everything we can to make sure that our videos get seen. We think that good stories told well have the potential to inspire an audience’s passion and break them out of passive consumption of the message. Maybe “going viral” isn’t our goal, but if and when it happens we know that it’s because we got the medium and the message right for the audience we’re communicating with.

Are You Ready to Try Video Storytelling?

Making a video that gets a lot of views doesn’t necessarily move the needle for an organization. Making a video that impacts an audience is a much better goal. When you make an impact video and find ways to make sure that it gets a lot of views, that’s the best of both worlds.

Argonaut Productions can help your organization tell a story that audiences love without stooping to the level of shiny objects, simulacra, or “mere rhetoric”. We can help you plan and execute video marketing strategies that elevate your brand, grow your network, and multiply your impact.

When you’re ready, give us a call.?