The quest for virility

One of the common internet traps is a mindless quest for numbers. When we first go online we’re obsessed with gathering Facebook friends, Twitter followers and LinkedIn connections.

For businesses, we get seduced by the prospect of big markets to sell to; which isn’t surprising when there’s nearly 700 million people on Facebook, over 50 million tweets sent every day and the group buying market is growing almost as quickly as the number of new entrants into the industry.

The current holy grail for many businesses is the viral video; a troupe of dancers extolling your business to surprised commuters, a cool ex-football player giving advice from a shower or a tasteful video of your staff doing their jobs naked is seen as the way to get millions of “likes” or “follows” from eager web consumers.

For the successful ones, creating an online clip seen by your mother and a million of her friends is an easy way to get a campaign to worldwide markets without spending massive marketing budgets. Not to mention the trip to Cannes and the accolades for any advertising agency associated with it.

Sadly, creating a video that goes viral is harder than it looks as we discussed at the Media 140 Conference in Perth last week; it has to be quirky, entertaining and attention grabbing, which is pretty well the antithesis of the typical corporate video.

To compound the budding viral videographer’s problems, there’s the corporate desire to control the message. Almost every high profile blogger or online editor has stories of struggling to get permission to use an organisation’s clip because of the managerial urge to control distribution.

No doubt those managers have good reasons for controlling the use of their videos but we can be sure those same control obsessed administrators are constantly bugging their agencies to create something viral.

Losing control is a great risk for managers and bureaucrats. Last year prolific wine blogger Gary Vaynerchuk visited Australia and gave the local wine industry some great publicity.

Sadly, in reviewing the wines from his visit he described a Yarra Valley wine as having “a taste of burned vomit”, probably putting the Australian wine market in the US back a decade.

Gary Vaynerchuk is probably the best case of someone who has grown a business through viral video, through adding interesting valuable content with a real character. An equivalent Australian success has been Natalie Tran’s Community Channel.

One of the other points with these is many of the early successes have been because they were early entrants into a new market. Today, the marketplace is a lot more crowded and videos, like any other online content, are struggling to get heard.

That’s not such a bad thing as it takes away the obsession with numbers and makes us focus on the quality of our online audience. Rather than obsessing about raw hits, we start considering where our customers are.

Group buying is a good example of where well-targeted campaigns work well. The businesses who are successfully using them are thinking about where the offer, product and audience fit into their business plan.

While a Charlie Sheen tweet might drive page views, the real business objective of the web is about establishing our brand and attracting the customers we want, not just achieving big numbers.

Paul Wallbank is one of Australia’s leading experts on how industries and societies are changing in this connected, globalised era. When he isn’t explaining technology issues, he helps businesses and community organisations find opportunities in the new economy.