I’ve been working with Photo Art Gallery for about 9 months in total, and four months full-on. I’m hoping to write up a bigger case study, but here is a brief one on a viral piece.

When someone whispers ‘let’s do some viral marketing’ I get excited and nervous. So much chance for creativity, so much chance for ugly FAIL. When advertising and promotion has the stigma of ‘you waste half of your budget on it, but you don’t know which half you waste’, the viral sub-genre has a worse track record. It’s down there with community engagement because you might not just waste money, you might cause damage.

Why is that? Well, basically you’re trying to force something natural. People forward on things that are interesting or funny. They forward them on because they want to. When you are ‘engineering’ something to be viral, you are trying to make it happen, not let it happen. Of course it depends on your approach, but to at least some degree this is true for all viral marketing attempts.

So when Andrew at Photo Art said they had done a video, I was curious but ready to put on the brakes. Especially from a team that with a lot of offline business experience, and a little, but quickly growing, bit of online experience. Could we pull it off?

The Video

The video was already underway, so we would have to do strategy afterwards. Not unusual. After seeing the video, I actually though it was pretty funny. Not LMAO but not cringe worthy either. Then I checked it with a few other people. Firstly, someone in the realm of photography who would give me an honest answer, so I asked Pierre who said he thought it was pretty good. Great start. Secondly, I asked my wife who often has to roadtest my geeky stuff and now gives brutal, useful feedback. “Lamo!” she said after watching half of it. So on completely bad research, we guessed that it could appeal to photographers but it probably wouldn’t ‘go mainstream’.

The Strategy

So if it was for photographers only, let’s use that. We’ll stay there in that segment and do more in a smaller pond. Our idea was to use the one video to get more videos. Bait for user generated content. We had about 3 weeks lead time and so we put together a very simple content program that encouraged photographer members of Photo Art to grab a little video camera and record a short burst next time they were at a shoot. It had to be simple because they cared about the photo, not a video. To make it easy, we gave them six easy questions to answer which should only take a minute. The goal will be that the one video draws them in, and from that we get maybe 50 videos from photographers. Will it work?

The Test

To see if it was even possible, and also to give us some momentum, we asked the community lietenants, some paid community participants, to create some videos. They’re busy, but we got about 8 videos. Some bad, some great, but it helped us iron out the bugs. We then extended the circle one step further. The lietenants reached out to their closest allies in the photography community and asked for some videos. Some enthusiasm, some rejection – “I haven’t got time for that”. that was expected. We now had about 10 videos which was enough to launch.

The Launch

In theory, great viral campaigns only need a slight push, and then they are off. Photo Art is a business in beta, with 1,000 change requests and as many bugs to work on. So we were pretty busy, and also we have a pretty small footprint on the web. We started by just adding it to our active forum, adding a link off the home page and submitting it to our social network groups (facebook, twitter, Tangler, Get Satisfaction). We had also set up a YouTube Channel and linked a few of the videos together. Then I got a tweet back from Lachlan Hardy. ‘Can’t see it. You don’t support my browser’. Ouch. OK, tough to go to the highly connected, front edge if you don’t suppor their browsers, but being young, we might have to live with that for a while. Then I emailed out to my family and friends who I thought might like it. My brother and cousin, both big ‘forwarders of funny stuff’ sent me an email saying ‘was this supposed to be funny?’. More ouch. (Lucky Lachlan didn’t get to see it. I might have lost a friend).

But photographers, and more importantly the photographers in the community were enjoying it. Phew.

The Results

It’s only been live for 6 hours, and only had 100 views, but we have a bunch of photographers wanting to create videos. And people are understanding what it’s all about which is more important. This was not a numbers game, it’s a quality connection one. Worse comes to worse, we have a few videos on YouTube from our good customers and a bit of active entertainment on the site.

Next Time

I really don’t know about viral campaigns like this. They are so delicate. Too much brand and they don’t work. Too little meaning and they go viral but have no impact. Maybe I’m too commercial on these, too markety. No doubt we’re trying too hard. Do you just keep the camera rolling and hope for magic? Do you hire an agency? I think, like most things, it’s good to try it, learn from it and try it again.

Viral vs Viral

It’s important to know that viral promotion is completely different from being viral. Viral promotion is an engineered effort to get people to talk about you. Being viral is when the use of your product or service has inherent or supportive virality. Skype for instance requires you to be told by someone or tell someone before it can be used. Facebook is pretty useless without other people. Booktagger is great by yourself, and even better with more people. At Pollenizer we try and understand the difference between a companies individual utility, social utility and community utility. Very important stuff, and the subject of another post (or book).

Campaign Bits

Main promo page with video – http://www.photoartgallery.com/birdy

Forum page for submitting videos

YouTube channel

Basically, I grabbed the domain, added WordPress, grabbed a theme, added a few plugins and customised it. A few hours work.

Then I added in a few blog posts to get the ball rolling and set up categories, etc.

Now it was time for some training. Both users, one in Melbourne, one in the Sydney office, were reasonable experienced web users but certainly not geeky and had never run a blog. However they were both used to working in basic content management systems and forums, including on Photo Art, so they conceptually knew what it meant to ‘publish’. A key term.

Most importantly though, they were both confident communicators. Anyone can do the training. Anyone can work out WordPress (or 50 other blogging platforms). But not everyone can stand on a public soap box, even if they are passionate about their subject, and get a word out. Remember, fear of public speaking is up their with fear of death, so it takes some guts.

The end result was that whilst I asked them to do a trial blog post each, they grabbed it by the horns and added a few useful posts in exactly the right style and substance that we aimed for. Very early days, of course, but a very promising start.

With other clients and projects, despite the best planning, training and tools and regularly prodding, it just never took off. The people behind it either weren’t committed or didn’t have the base personality to be a blogger.

As just implied, even if you’re not ‘born to be a blogger’ you can get good at it through diligence and persistence (like most things, I think, including leadership).

You get used to thinking like a blogger.
You recognise good blog fodder when you see it.
You carve aside time to do it.
You get faster at it, so it feels less like a burden.
You start to get positive feedback, so it feels like a joy.

Of course if you combine the personality with the persistence then you’ve potentially got a great blog in the making.

Are you a natural blogger?
Have you seen people crash and burn as bloggers?
How long does it take to get your ‘blog legs’?