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The “Cardboard arcade kid”, vs “Push button to add drama” – value in viral video?

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Two weeks ago I posted a quick blog post about a video featuring 9-year-old Caine Monroy, who built a cardboard arcade over a summer vacation, and waited for his first customer to turn up.

Well, after two weeks, the result of his first customer happening to make a video about him, and then organising a flashmob via Reddit and Facebook is in.

Almost $200,000 dollars has been raised from what began as a child creating something cool with some old cardboard boxes, and it has a following that many brands would kill for. So what lessons could you take from something like this in terms of viral video?

  • Doing something interesting is key – if Caine hadn’t built his cardboard arcade for the fun of it, and then won over his only customer, filmmaker Nirvan Mullick, then none of this would have happened.
  • Relationships count – to make the flashmob happen, Mullick had help from the Reddit community, and also from friends and contacts who were able to post the event on popular LA recommendation sites and Facebook pages.
  • Spread it far – obviously we all put our videos on Youtube, but in this case, Vimeo actually received more views. Do you only focus on the first-placed site of it’s kind?
  • Give people inspiration – part of the effect has been kids around the world building there own cardboard arcades, which are constantly being featured on the Caine’s Arcade Facebook page etc.
  • Give people quick and easy ways to contribute – the scholarship fund suggests contributing ‘$1 or more’ to help Caine and other children prepare for college. Or you can buy a T-shirt or the film’s theme song via iTunes.

So basically:

  • Interesting.
  • Inspiring.
  • Relationships.
  • Shared.
  • Easy participation.

But what’s also missed in a lot of digital activity and promotion is that there was no guarantee that this particular video would take off. Besides Mullick’s time and energy in capturing and editing the footage and his promotional efforts since then, the reception it has received has been down to the people seeing it and responding, which led to media interest putting it in front of more people.

And yet still brands focus on big stunts and extravagant campaign approaches to video and asking people to do things. A lot of people have also been sharing this video for a new television channel launch:

OK, it’s a cool idea, and it does involve some participation in terms of kicking off the action by pressing the big red button, but then what? The audience watches everything unfold, and then possibly pays attention to the launch of a new TV channel in Belgium. Or not. It doesn’t lead onto anyone doing anything except watching some TV shows.

  • 29 Million Youtube views
  • 733 Likes on Facebook
  • 80 Followers on Twitter.

A couple of parody videos have been created, including a nice Lego version, but that’s about your lot. To put it another way, the big TV advertisement may have driven awareness of the television channel launch and resulted in higher audience figures initially, but most of you reading this would have comparable reach online, because messaging you is likely to give some interaction.

The question is what effect you want to achieve…

Google may harm your computer – Malware warning error

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Google Search appears to have gone into a Malware warning meltdown, with every natural search result being flagged with ‘This site may harm your computer’. And that includes Google itself!

My first though was perhaps a local virus, but within seconds of posting about it on Twitter I started getting responses indicating that it’s affecting everyone.

I’m sure it’s probably a momentary problem, but it’s annoying as you have to go to any site via the Google Warning page and then copy and paste the url manually to reach your destination site – and in the meantime there’s no way to tell which sites might really be flagged up as dangerous.

Incidentally, there’s no news yet on the Google Blog, which is also flagged as dangerous via search!

Update: 3.09pm GMT:

News results within search results appear to be fine, and Image Search is OK as well. Meanwhile Twitter has gone into overdrive about it. It seems as if StopBadware.org, which Google uses for Malware information etc, is down, which is a likely cause.

Google News Search and Google Blog Search both appear to be running fine (Via @Jobsworth).

Update: 3.22pm GMT – Normality Restored.

It looks as if the Apocalypse has been postponed as results are back to normal. Although StopBadware is still offline.

Update: 5pm – Official response from Google:

There’s an official response on the Google Blog – An update to the url list of bad sites supplied by StopBadware was released, and…

‘Unfortunately (and here’s the human error), the URL of ‘/’ was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and ‘/’ expands to all URLs. Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file. Since we push these updates in a staggered and rolling fashion, the errors began appearing between 6:27 a.m. and 6:40 a.m. and began disappearing between 7:10 and 7:25 a.m., so the duration of the problem for any particular user was approximately 40 minutes.’

Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience

Monetising Twitter with Magpie Ads – Week 2 round-up

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When I wrote about my first week of using Magpie to monetise my Twitter account, I wondered if there was the inventory to even get close to the ratios of 5 posts to one advert.

The second week appears to be backing up this theory – since then I’ve had just a couple of advertising messages, raising my earnings up to the 17 Euro mark, despite leaving the ratio at 5:1. At this rate it will be quite a while before I reach the minimum payout of 50 Euros.

But as I said before, this is a good thing in some ways, as one or two adverts a day seems to be an amount that doesn’t offend – and perhaps the number of advertisers will increase after Twitter co-founder Biz Stone picked the service over monetisation alternative Twittad in an LA Times article.

“I think any kinds of projects that focus more on the Twitter updates are more compelling,” Stone said.

For the record, Twittad is claiming 1600 sign-ups, 170 advertisers, and I’ve just finished my first month of allowing them to serve adverts on my profile page. (Feel free to book me for another month right now!)

Interestingly Ev Williams has recently said the economic climate means Twitter will seek to monetise in Quarter 1 2009.

From Cnet: “The revenue plans aren’t just ads or sponsorships. “We want revenues to be product-based. Google built something that can really scale, and that’s our intention as well.”

Still, in the meantime if you want to try Magpie, why not use a link that also helps to fund 140char? Strangely the Twittad affiliate scheme seems to have a form error at the moment.

Results and reaction to using Magpie advertising in Twitter: Week 1

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So I’ve been using Magpie to serve advertising within my Twitter feed for one week now, and I thought it was a good time to post the results and reaction.

I started on November 28th, warning my followers that I was about to start testing the system, and immediately lost one follower, with about 4 of the 1598 warning me that they would either unfollow immediately, or consider dropping me if it became more than a test.

One week later, and my follower account is currently 1669 followers, partly as a result of my normal addition of interesting people which has also seen my following count raise by a similar amount.

Magpie offers the ability to set the ratio of advertising to normal messages, and I’ve stuck with the 5:1 default ratio as a starting point to see how much inventory was served – within 7 days, and with around 500+ tweets, Magpie has so far served three advertising messages, earning me a little over 10 Euros.

So far, since the initial response to the test I’ve not had a single message regarding the advertising place in my tweets, and I’m not aware of anyone responding unfavourably.

Reaction so far:

So far it’s seemed that Magpie’s inventory means the adverts being served are closer to the maximum 200:1 ratio than 5:1, which is probably a good thing – particular after the adverse reaction it generated on launch.

It’s made me think that perhaps rather than a tweet to ad ratio (As the number of tweets can vary enormously for any user per day), perhaps there should also be an adverts per day ratio, if the inventory being served increases. I do wonder how many potential advertisers were dissuaded by the outcry on Twitter, and whether the inventory will increase now that the dust has settled.

It also means that it will take 5 weeks for me to reach the minimum payout of 50 Euros at current rates – not terrible when compared to Google Adsense etc, and also not bad for something which wasn’t really monetised until now (I am also trialling Twittad to see if monetising Twitter profile backgrounds is realistic)

I’m definitely intending to keep the test going for a while longer to see what happens to advertising ratios, and to see if there is any more response to the presence of adverts in my Twitter feed (Also to see if the payout system works).

Incidentally, it’s also running on the 140char test account: @140char_com, which I’m going to be using more in the future to test services which may carry an element of risk to them, after the growing concerns that various 3rd party applications require both your Twitter username and password. This way I can identify which services are a real risk without running the chance of compromising my main personal account which I’ve built up over 18 months or so! With just 18 followers, the first ad paid just 0.02 Euros!

Let me know if you’ve been using the service, or your reaction to it, particularly if you’ve unfollowed me because of it!

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