by Tim Staples
As these YouTubers showed what was possible, brands jumped in and tried to do the same thing, that is, create viral content and build communities of followers. The focus on promoting brands on the internet was all about going viral, getting as many eyeballs on your content as possible. Millions of dollars were spent trying to make ads go viral.
When the very first YouTube video was uploaded, on April 23, 2005, not many people had video cameras, let alone the then-revolutionary delivery system of “broadband” access. But by 2018, more than 1.3 billion people were using YouTube, watching 5 billion videos a day and uploading new content at the astonishing rate of 300 hours of video every minute.
With so much content available at everyone’s fingertips, the world became a very noisy place. People became bombarded by content, exposed to as many as 5,000 online ads per day.
For brands this created a tricky issue. Not only are the vast majority of people jaded and immune to traditional commercials, but they are also very sophisticated and adept at filtering the noise. On platforms like Facebook, they swipe up like a serial dater blowing through Tinder, based on a split-second gut call. On YouTube, the only reason they stay is to wait for the skip button to appear in 3 . . . 2 . . . 1, and then it’s a quick look and click. Add that to the algorithm changes on the major social networks, which limit the number of people who see your post, and you begin to see the difficult challenge of getting people’s attention.
The irony is that while everyone is trying to be noticed, no one gets noticed. In a world with no attention span, even virality has become less valuable.
Remember the woman who bought the Chewbacca mask at Kohl’s, put it on while she was in her car, and made a video laughing at herself? At the time, back in 2016, it was the biggest live-streaming video on Facebook ever. It was viewed by 162 million people, more than double the number who saw the second-place video that year.*
She became a major internet sensation, appeared on The Late Late Show, and received thousands of dollars in perks from various companies looking to ride the tail of her notoriety. But the shelf life of her fame was about two weeks. She then returned to her normal, everyday life, and now people would be hard-pressed to remember her name. Sometimes viral gets you nowhere.
So how does a brand embrace the dynamics of the internet world and break through all of this noise?
The answer is simple: Be shareable.
Being shareable means that you create content with such high value for the people viewing it that they are compelled to share it with their friends. This mindset puts the viewer first and builds a relationship before attempting to sell, essentially the opposite of traditional advertising’s approach. As you’ll learn in this book, understanding shareability and attracting shares are some of the most valuable things you can do for your brand.
Don’t take my word for it. Ask the Ayzenberg Group, the firm that delivers the Ayzenberg Earned Media Value Index Report. In an attempt to quantify the value that social media response provided to brands, the report assigns a dollar value to the various actions, such as a Like, a share, or a comment, that people can take on all the different social platforms. For example, in 2018 they gave a VPS (value per share) of $2.58 on tumblr, $2.14 on Facebook, $1.67 on Twitter, $0.91 on YouTube, and $0.10 on Pinterest.
The share is the most coveted action. It commands the highest premium and delivers the most value. That’s because a share is what turns your audience into your brand ambassador, engaging them to tacitly recommend your brand messaging to their friends. This “word of mouth” endorsement has always been the gold standard of advertising, because it is the most meaningful.
Being shareable is all about making people lean in rather than click off or swipe past.
All social platforms are built on the concept of sharing. They all promote content that shares well—and people on those platforms will share your brand message if it’s crafted right.
That’s an incredibly dynamic concept. People will share your brand message. It’s the ultimate word-of-mouth marketing—you get the people to do the marketing for you. You give them something of value, something that just so happens to be carrying your brand message, and they share it with their friends, saying, “Hey, check out this cool thing I found!”
You are the cool thing. You.
Think about that. You are no longer the ad they all swipe past instantly. Instead, you are the beautiful pebble they find on the beach, the cool new trend they love, the most happening of all the new things.
This evolution past virality is called shareability. Virality is still a good thing, but it is increasingly harder to attain and even more uncontrollable when captured. Shareability, on the other hand, grants predictability and value and allows your message to grow exponentially.
Though virality hasn’t totally lost all its magic and can be useful, it’s just no longer the top goal for content. Virality will always be a useful mechanism in branding, but chasing virality is a thing of the past. The focus now is on being shareable. That will expand your message, give you a competitive advantage, and grow your brand.
What Do People Share?
Now that you understand the importance of being shareable, the next step is to look at the types of content that have been widely shared on the internet. This is not a literal exercise, as certain types of content may have little relevance to your brand or may prove unrealistic for you to execute. But what has succeeded in the past can teach you valuable lessons about how the internet works, and may give you inspiration as to what will work in the future.
In the glory days of online virality, there were essentially five types of content that went to the top of the YouTube charts day after day.
First were Music Videos.
From the early days of YouTube, music videos have dominated the platform and driven hundreds of billions of views. Prior to the internet, artists and labels had been making these short films around hit songs for decades dating back to the MTV era, so they already were skilled at telling their musical stories in 3–4 minute videos, the ideal length for the YouTube platform. When you also consider that the record labels provided substantial budgets to make these videos and celebrity music artists delivered the star power to promote them, it makes perfect sense that music videos and the internet would prove a powerful marriage.
It was a music video, in fact, that was the first YouTube video to surpass 1 billion views, when the South Korean rapper Psy’s “Gangnam Style” took the internet by storm in 2012 and was recognized by the Guinness World Records as the video with the most Likes on YouTube that year.*
Want a case study in being shareable? Study “Gangnam Style.” In an era when everyone was taking themselves and their music very seriously, Psy, whose real name is Park Jae-sang, did the exact opposite, making fun of not only himself but basically every pop cliché that has ever existed. And he did this while delivering a catchy tune and a series of ridiculous dance moves that were easy to learn and hilarious to watch. It’s no wonder that the song and Psy became an international sensation, topping the music charts in 30 countries and cited by President Obama during a meeting with the South Korean president at the White House as a powerful emblem of Korean culture. Heck, Obama even attempted the dance moves.
The second category was what we affectionately call Adorable Babies. This doesn’t literally mean that the videos have to be about babies, but rather about people—often babies—doing or saying cute, funny, or memorable things.
Think of it like a YouTube version of America’s Funniest Home Videos, where an intimate yet surprising moment is shared with the world. A perfect example of this is one of the most viewed non-music videos on YouTube, titled “Charlie bit my finger—again!” In the video, a young boy named Harry is sitting in a chair with his baby brother, Charlie, on his lap. In the beginning of the video, Harry laughs as Charlie lightly nips at his finger. But as the video continues, Charlie chomps down, sending Harry into screams and tears and then delivering the memorable li
ne to his infant brother—“Charlie! That really hurt!”—to which Charlie responds with a devious laugh. When Harry comes around to a smile at the end the video, it becomes a sweet and familiar portrait of two brothers that any parent could relate to. The video quickly went viral and has driven over 880 million views and has spawned numerous remixes and parodies.
The third category we call Shock and Awe. These are videos that showcase awesome, crazy actions that we haven’t seen before.
In the early days of YouTube, this category involved a lot of videos from extreme sports. Clearly, sports has always been a huge part of the viewing ethos, both in America and around the world. The primary traditional sports, including soccer, baseball, American football, basketball, hockey, auto racing, and golf, have been staples of television programming for decades. They have consistently driven some of the highest ratings on television. The Super Bowl attracts 90 million viewers in the United States, and the World Cup and the Olympic Games far more globally.
But in the mid-2000s, emerging sports like skateboarding, BMX, and snowboarding became wildly popular with a young audience, but were not receiving traditional television exposure. The energy drink Red Bull stepped in to fill this void. They championed extreme sports and started to build shareable videos around young athletes doing radical things like a flip on a bike, a jump off a cliff, or a dive out of an airplane. This strategy has been incredibly powerful, driving billions of views and pushing Red Bull to become one of the most successfully branded beverages in the world. With each success, Red Bull grew even bolder with the content that they produced. This led to the epic 2012 stunt titled “Felix Baumgartner’s supersonic freefall from 128k.”* The video featured daredevil Baumgartner jumping to earth from a helium balloon in the stratosphere. I can’t imagine a more shareable headline than that!
Number four was Prank Videos.
This category was tremendously successful in the early days of YouTube, and still carries on today. We all know that people love surprises, and the early YouTubers discovered that capturing people’s reactions to unexpected events was pure internet gold. In the beginning, the pranks were fairly simplistic, like the video “BEST scare prank EVER!!!” Uploaded in 2006, it featured a guy named Andy, who puts on a creepy mask and a hoodie and scares the daylights out of his buddy the precise moment he wakes up.
As this category evolved, the bar was raised and pranksters pushed the limits to break through a growing sea of competition. In 2011, late-night host Jimmy Kimmel engineered a prank in which, on the day after Halloween, parents told their unsuspecting children that they had eaten all of their Halloween candy. The kids’ reactions were priceless and the video soared to 60 million views.*
Over the past ten years, prank videos have generated billions of views and turned ordinary people like Jack Vale and Roman Atwood into multimillionaire YouTubers.
Last, but certainly not least, was Comedy Videos.
Comedy, still going strong, has been one of the most successful genres online, and it makes up a sizable percentage of shareable content. This is a broad category, encompassing everything from standup comedians’ bits to late-night hosts’ monologues to amateur slapstick. Many of the early innovators of new comedic formats on the internet came from the social platform Vine.
One of the biggest acts to come out of Vine was a guy named King Bach. Born in Toronto to Jamaican parents, Bach eventually made his way to Los Angeles, where he joined the Groundlings. His videos were edgy, slapstick comedy built around real-world topics that he took to hyperbolic, illogical conclusions. Videos on Vine were limited to 6 seconds, so Bach’s videos were filmed in an ADD style perfect for the YouTube generation. He became so proficient at the format that he accrued over 15 million followers and became the number-one star in the world on Vine. This success then crossed over to YouTube and Instagram, and Bach eventually became a traditional media star as well, appearing on television shows like House of Lies and in movies like the spoof comedy hit Fifty Shades of Black. He is currently the second-most-followed African American entertainer on social media, right behind Kevin Hart.
Late-night hosts like Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel have also found success with short-form comedy on the internet. Armed with television budgets and a Rolodex of celebrity guests, Fallon and Kimmel have created some of the most shareable videos over the past ten years. Kimmel created the memorable self-deprecating format “Celebrities Read Mean Tweets,” where celebrities appear on camera and read real, unflattering tweets about themselves. Fallon also created “Lip Sync Battles,” where celebrities basically try to outperform each other by dancing while lip-syncing a well-known song. The videos have been so successful that they launched a television show spinoff on Spike TV.
Although these categories have been widely successful for many people, bear in mind they may not be the right fit for you. Most brands, for instance, wouldn’t be comfortable pranking their customers or launching a man from the stratosphere. Even comedy can be a tough dynamic to pull off for many companies.
And don’t forget: The early days of the internet featured a lot of content that was, to put it politely, sophomoric. Many of the most viewed and shared videos up until 2010 showed people jumping out of planes or getting kicked in the groin. The second wave of internet content is more productive, giving people the chance to learn, be inspired, and find the better attributes of humanity. The themes of this content are more widely used to promote brands.
Shareable Brandable Content
Fortunately, the internet has matured and expanded, and several popular new styles of shareable content are far more brand-friendly. Chief among them are Inspirational Videos, Educational Videos, and what we call Good Samaritan Videos.
One of the early pioneers of inspirational content was the TED Conference, which features TED Talks, speeches addressing the topics of technology, entertainment, and design (hence the term TED). These talks have attracted some of the biggest names in these fields, including Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Stephen Hawking. Along with inspiration, the talks often deliver practical information and guiding principles applicable to even the most common human dilemmas.
An example of an immensely shareable TED Talk was Simon Sinek’s 2009 talk titled “How Great Leaders Inspire Action.” The video is simply just Sinek, a relatively unknown author at the time, on stage at a TED event in Puget Sound, Washington, equipped with only a blank sheet of paper and a black marker. Sinek poses a very simple question to the audience: why are some people and organizations more innovative, more influential, and more profitable than others? He then goes on to illustrate what he calls the “Golden Circle,” explaining how successful leaders like Steve Jobs and Martin Luther King Jr. realized that people won’t truly buy in to a product, movement, or idea until they understand the WHY behind it. Sinek’s production quality was extremely low rent, just a marker scribbling circles on a large pad of paper on an easel, but the wisdom was pure gold, catapulting the video to over 40 million views and launching his publishing career into the stratosphere.
Educational content is a broad, fairly self-explanatory category that involves videos created with the intent of teaching the audience about a particular subject or making them smarter about a topic. While this may sound boring, some very smart people have used this method to present valuable information in an entertaining and shareable fashion.
The YouTube channel Vsauce, created by an educator named Michael Stevens from Kansas, illustrates this point nicely. Stevens has figured out how to investigate out-of-the-ordinary questions about math, psychology, and philosophy in fun, thought-provoking ways. Most of his videos are titled with a question, such as “What Is the Speed of Dark?” or “What Can You Do Without a Brain?” They use science and creative thinking to examine the way we look at the world. Stevens’s offbeat persona has resonated with a global audience, and in 2018 the Vsauce channel reached 13 million subscribers.
Another YouTube channel doing education differently is Smarter Every Day.
Launched in 2007 by an American engineer named Destin Sandlin, the channel explores the everyday world through the eyes of science. Sandlin has tackled topics ranging from how tattooing works to why cats flip in the air to the truth about toilet swirl. And he does it all with a contagious style that has racked up over 400 million views.
At Shareability, we went a step further in 2016 when we partnered with Prince Ea to take on the establishment of public education. Prince Ea, whose real name is Richard Williams, is a spoken-word artist who makes message-driven videos and has a significant following on Facebook. The project was funded by Neste, a Finnish energy company whose philanthropic mission is to reform education.
The headline was bold—“We wanted to put the failing education system in the U.S. on trial.” Richard wrote a rap poem titled “I Just Sued the School System!!!” and we shot a video with him as a prosecutor in a courtroom, where he presents his case against American education. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, today on trial we have modern day schooling,” he opens.
The unique message, combining bold language and stunning visuals, made quite the impact. The video, titled “The People vs. the School System,” was ripped and reposted across the internet, ultimately hitting 350 million views and 9 million shares, making it one of the most shared PSAs (public service announcements) in the history of the internet. The video proved that even the most seemingly boring topics can ignite widespread sharing if presented in an entertaining way. The results also show that new avenues are opening for videos sponsored by corporations, foundations, and activists to create and share content on social issues that might otherwise be ignored.
When done right, educational content can be dynamic and shareable, which is why it has been one of the fastest-growing genres on the internet.
