How to Go Viral – The Science Behind Content that Spreads

Welcome back to the digital marketing podcast brought to you by TargetInternet.com. My name is Daniel Rose, and in this episode we have a guide to how to go viral. Before you say it, that old thing when it bosses, we need this content to go viral. Is it really a thing? Well, actually what we've got here is an interview of Brendan Kane and Brendan blew me away having read some of his books and then managing to interview him. He wrote a book one million followers, which is an experiment in how can you go from scratch and get a million followers and Brendan will focus through it. But what he's really spoken about in his other books is how can you make virality repeatable? How can you social media as a business multiplier? Can you do this while staying on brand? And actually what are the video and content formats that really, really work? And he has the most amazing technique to looking at this, and he made me change my mind on something completely, which is I was really concerned about, you know, people just kind of looking at these different formats of videos that are out there and just doing the same thing that other people are doing. It's not about that at all, but actually what he does is reflect on it. So I am here with Brendan Kane. So why don't you just tell us Brendan a bit about the book one million followers and the kind of work that went into it as well? Because I was fascinated when the PR company reached out about this. And I love the book, so yeah, tell me a bit about it. Yeah, so I kind of stumbled my way into social media. So I initially wanted to be a film producer and went to film school, hopefully learning kind of some aspects of business because I thought like to be a producer, you know, you know, what business is, but quickly realized it didn't teach you anything about business and film school. So this was like 2002, 2003. So at the time, I just said like, hey, I'm going to start a few businesses to learn on my own. And the most cost-efficient way was to create online companies. So I started to get my foothold in digital. And then when I graduated from film school, I moved to LA in 2005 to pursue a career in film as a producer. But I realized that was one of a million people. Like, you know, you want to, like the beautiful thing about the film industry is everybody starts at the bottom. So I started at the bottom, making coffee, copies, deliveries. But when the people I wanted to connect with the heads of the studios or producers or directors said, well, why did you move here? I would say, I want to be a film producer and I could see everybody's eyes glaze over. So I just take a step back and find, well, what was my hook point? Well, how could I stand out? And I just realized in the studio I was working for that every time we finished a film, there'd be a sense of anxiety and stress that would come over the studio because we were investing tens of millions of dollars into a single piece of content and then committing tens of millions of dollars to market that piece of content. And it's very different than any other business. You don't have years or decades to build a brand. You literally have months for hundreds of millions of people around the world to know about this. So I took a step back and I in social media was first coming on the scene. And you know, because it was 2005, my space was the parameter player. They had 25 million users. Facebook had just launched the year before it only had six million and YouTube was in its first year to eight million users. So I just thought like, well, these new things are emerging these new platforms. And there's no such thing as an influencer. But I saw that, you know, there was these people creating content from their bedrooms or their webcams reaching millions of people. So I just went to the head of the studio and said, Hey, I want to reach out to these people on YouTube and connect them with our movie stars and movies to interact and create promotional content, which we became the first ever influencer campaign on YouTube, which was wildly successful is for a movie called Crank with Jason Statham. And it was like a smaller movie didn't have a huge budget, but it ended up being very profitable because we, we, you know, tapped into these resources. So that's how we first got into social media. And then I kind of kept evolving from there. I built the first ever influencer technology platform on top of my space and licensed it to MTV. And then did other partnerships with MTV, which opened up the doors to work with celebrities like Taylor Swift and Rihanna on kind of their social media commerce strategies. And then Goddard's journalism worked with Katy Kirk with a little bit. Goddard's a paid media. But basically how I came to the idea with the book is I was doing all of this behind the scenes of working with Fortune 500 companies and celebrities. And when I would talk to people, they're like, Oh, yeah, it's because you're working with MTV or Vice Magazine or IKEA. That's the reason it's working. And I knew because I've tested so much and saw so much data that it could be applied to anyone. And that's where I came up with the idea for creating the book one million followers to kind of prove that out that like this kind of these strategies and social media was accessible to everyone, not just mainstream corporations and people with large budgets or teams or fancy titles. Fantastic. So talk us through that key premise of the book as well for people that don't think about it because I think it's a great premise and it's a brave premise as well to work at and to kind of prove that point. Yes. So the premise was running an experiment by myself because I wasn't a celebrity. Yes, I worked in the movie industry but I was behind the camera. I didn't have an audience. I didn't have a following. I probably knew professionally 20 or 30 people at the time. So it wasn't like I was communicating with a ton of people or had this big audience. But the premise was building an audience of a million people in 100 countries in less than 30 days, leveraging the systems that I developed. Now it wasn't about making me famous. It wasn't about turning me into an influencer. It was purely an experiment. And a part of that experiment was testing different types of content around myself to understand what will cause people to share my content and high velocity and then opt in to follow my at the first experiment I did was on Facebook. So the one of the things I've noticed as well, I mean we'll come into this later on, is the fact that you kind of tied together the social media but also the email side of things because I've signed up for your newsletters and they're they're phenomenally well tied in with all this as well. So I kind of the point on you get to is that you feel that virality is repeatable and you proven that point time and time again you go to the website which we'll talk about in a moment as well. So is it repeatable because most marketers they would say no no you can't when your bosses are make this go viral they're kind of filled with dread but you kind of proven that. So do you want to talk us through that? Yeah so about eight years ago so I've been in the space since 2005 so I've been learning like trial and error through social media and obviously social media has evolved dramatically since 2005 and one of the the biggest factors in the difference between what it was when I first started versus where it is today is purely the number of people you know when I first started there's less than 50 million people using social media today there's over 5 billion people using it so it's just the sheer amount of content so obviously I've you know learned and tested and tried things that worked haven't worked but about eight years ago we started to kind of create our creative model from scratch and the core kind of like real and we can dive as deep as you want into the creative model but one of the core elements to the creative model is qualitative analysis. So what does that actually mean? Well let's talk about the difference between quantitative and qualitative so quantitative is just the pure numbers it's how many views how many click-throughs how what reach you know the retention graph things of that nature it's the hard numbers now those are important things to have but where they're limited it doesn't explain the why it does a good job of telling you something worked or didn't work but not the fundamental why behind it so that's where qualitative analysis comes in and that's kind of the contributing storytelling elements and in tools that you use to drive performance so again I started going to in college going to film school so if you think about and I'm sure people have seen it in movie years or heard of friends or stories like what do you do when you go to film school? Well you sit down and watch classic movies you break them down even though I wanted to be a producer they made me take acting classes they made me take editing classes they made me direct things light sets be a cinematographer why? Because all of these small nuances contribute to whether you create a success movie or not so the people listening to this I'm sure you've probably sat down you're super excited to see a movie and you left you like you know it just something was missing I don't know what it was but it wasn't as good as I thought well that was because one of those qualitative elements were off maybe the the director just didn't deliver he was going through a divorce or maybe the actors had bad chemistry or the dialogue was bad now the reality is social media is the same people kind of think social media is like this new mystic kind of medium that it's a mystery black box but the reality is it's just another storytelling platform and the people that succeed and win are the best storytellers so that's why in our model we focus so heavily on the qualitative elements of what really makes up a good story how to tell a good story so we've spent over 10,000 hours researching what we call storytelling formats and structures and understanding deeply what makes them successful so we've analyzed over 300 of these formats and I say that because there's a lot of them out there and I'll give you some prime examples one that pretty much everybody has seen is called man on the street and it's you approach a random stranger on the street and you engage and interact with them now the beauty of formats is they can be leveraged for any industry or sector so man on the street it's used by photographers like I know a friend Alex Temp that's a mass analysis of 20 million people where he approaches random strangers in the street offers them a professional photo shoot there's an account the school of hard knocks that asks people well how did you make your first million dollars there's a guy body by mark that asks you know fit people how did you you know what's your workout Caleb Simpson you know ask people for home tours so these formats are very flexible now the interesting thing about man on the street and this kind of where I know that social media is is is not some mystery black box that man on the street format generates billions and billions of views and tens of millions of followers you know when it was invented in 1954 for the first season of the tonight show so it shows you like this story tell in format was invented in 1954 but it still works today another format is called two characters one light bulb where it's the same person in place two different characters and they debunk a common myth or misconception about an industry so Erica Colberg uses this about the the fine print of legal contracts like what happens when your flight gets canceled what happens your AirPods get break Mark Tilbury uses it for for breaking down elements of buying a car or insurance or things of that nature that one the first time I saw was in Austin powers 1997 when he played doctor evil and Austin powers going back and forth so we look at these formats and what we do is we cross analyze and study what's the difference between when people use that format to generate tens of millions of views versus when people use that exact same format and generate tens of thousands of views and that's where kind of the the science kind of comes into play and you can really understand how and why things go viral but just as important how and why things don't go viral what what I was fascinated for as well when I was reading the book was that I kind of suddenly clicked him when you talked about the format and it's like okay I can get it now because you've got these these formats that have worked for years there's lots of new ones out there as well but actually working out what's going to be the best one for this particular brand to deliver what it needs to deliver that's going to generate what they want but then that that piece of actually saying this is why works this is why it doesn't work and this is why it's and I think that was that was the key thing to me that really kind of really resonated so let's move on to that a little bit it's how can you do this while staying on brand and actually generating the desired outcomes you want so yes we can we can get great reach we can go off there we can get loads of views because entertainment and it's you know it's engaging and all those kind of things but how do you do it within that framework of the business and organization or brand? Yeah so number one is we never work with clients or tell somebody to do something for the sake of going viral it has to translate into business outcomes so we're not going to tell you to do a silly tick-tock dance video or follow some silly trend just because they can generate millions of views it has to tie to your specific expertise it's also the reason that we have a team of researchers we've spent the 10,000 hours identified 300 formats by the end of year will be a 500 because our kind of you know core philosophies how do we match a client a brand an individual to their ideal format because there's two things that I consider at a macro level when helping people find their format number one what is the resources that they have available to them because I don't try and extend people beyond the resources like there are formats literally that you can use an iPhone and go viral like we have a hand doctor that sort of was zero followers zero views and is that 800,000 followers and you know got a book deal and a TV deal out of it but number two what excites you like what is a format that you just absolutely love that you look at it and be like you know this is the perfect vehicle for me to share my zone of genius my expertise that's related to my subject matter so that's kind of the first component the second one is you have to kind of reframe the difference between like organic social media and building an audience and like paid media so paid media is direct response you're just trying to just drive a transaction organic social media is trying to build an audience and building an audience is getting people to know like and trust you to the point that they automatically want to buy from you and that's a big kind of mindset shift that a lot of people need to know is like I run into so many brands and even individuals that are struggling because what they do is they treat their social media profile like their website and their organic posts like their ads and that's just not the case like I ask everybody listening to this one was the last time you you logged on the social media and be like I want to see a great ad today no that's not why we do it but again I understand we are in the business of driving business outcomes we want to drive success so what we purely see is how can we find a format that really connects with the expertise their zone of genius that will ultimately inspire people to build that relationship where they want to take that next level so I'll just give you a prime example we had a leather craftsman come to us Tanner Leatherstein you know a really fascinating guy age 11 he created his first leather jack he just fell in love with creating that so he created a leather goods company you know when he grew up and you know he approached social media like most people was hey my social media profiles my website and I'm just going to create ads and it just wasn't breaking through so we helped them develop a format called is it worth it where basically you know he he takes like a five thousand dollar Chanel handbag and yes he actually buys these handbags for the price deconstructs it on screen and shows you whether it's worth the money you're paying for it so that single format took him from 2000 follows a 2.5 million across social media channels and he has 94 videos over a million views now people may ask well why if he's taking other people's handbags how does that translate into business for him well what he's doing is he's building trust he's building a relationship with the audience and the audience size is so scalable people build their relationship they automatically want to take that next step they want to click on the link in his bio visit his website see what are the products or services that he sells I mean he even told me when we were having dinner a few weeks ago like he has to be careful about when he launches videos because his products will sell out because it just creates that much demand so it's a bit of a kind of mindset shift but if you choose a format that's authentic to you it demonstrates your core expertise your zone of genius it will automatically lead to people wanting to buy from you but the it is a little bit different of like of what people typically look at of terms of like just trying to sell the product do product shots feature the product in every kind of video type scenario yeah I think that mindset change we talked about in the podcast a fair bit before because in a way we're in a good zone at the moment because the fact is that measurements getting harder and actually I think that's made things a little bit better because when we were going through your right direct response you got this many clicks this many conversions that that was where the money was getting spent and actually we know the only reason you probably clicked on that brand in the first place is you trusted them because you've been listening to the podcast for six months beforehand so actually I think now people are maybe taking that step back and saying look that relationship building that brand building is so much more hard of this and that's why the book to me would just really bloom your way I think oh right I get it it is trying to persuade people that mindset change so I really think people should get and read it one of the things that I there was an interesting point that I thought was fairly against best practice in my mind first of all was like why mastering viral formats on TikTok trumps originality and I was really interested in that because it's not now being original it's the best thing you can possibly do but yet to talk us through that yeah so the best the best way I can give an analogy to break it out so again I started my my career in the film industry and one of the things that I learned from that is is movies are very formulaic so if you think about any movie or the past 100 years that you watched almost everyone follows the same format and the three-act structure so if you if you think because a lot of people like you said have this concern of like well formats sound great but they're going to restrict my creativity but in reality they unlock creativity so we think one of the best storytellers of our generation Steven Spielberg you know you have jaws versus ET Jurassic Park versus Indiana Jones Lincoln versus saving private Ryan like they're all distinct different stories but they're they feel unique they feel original but they're all using the same structure and but when we sit down and watch any movie we're not sitting down to be like oh Steven I got you using the three-act structure again like this is going to be boring no that structure what it does for a filmmaker like a Steven Spielberg it gives you a container that is proven to work that allows you to then master all the nuances within that container within that format structure and the same thing applies with social media is when we have the guardrails of a structure it allows us to master the nuances within that structure so that we can become a genius storyteller another analogy to think about because a lot of people think I need to be original with each post I need to I need to chase trends I need to do the latest thing so if we were to sit down and say you know what we want we're going to learn a musical instrument we're going to become a masterful master of a musical instrument and there's two tracks that we can take is like the the original trend route or the format route well the original trend route would look something like this week one we we start with a piano week two we switch to the drums week three we switch to the flute then one week four we go to the violin we keep switching the goal post well are we going to be good at any of these versus if we chose the format rounds to say you know what we're going to spend the next year mastering the piano like that's where it comes through and that's where you see the most successful people on social media when they're successful because of social media is they sit down they find their format and they master the nuances how to tell the story within it now again formats unlock creativity you can still put your zone of genius in there and be able to share the information that you want to yeah I love it I mean it's it's really changing my mindset about the whole thing because they've been this big pushback events kind of trend jacking to jumping on the latest trend but actually when I kind of thought about it I thought well actually you could say is if this thing's working for everyone there's also the argument of like if I double down on that and that's just a format that I'm using then actually that that can work so that's maybe why some people are getting some leverage off the back of it so I think it's really made me reanalyze things a little bit as well yeah because again trend jacking is like you're you're you're jumping from thing to thing and you're not mastering the fundamentals of telling a story you look at again like we all watch sitcoms like TV sitcoms like friends or Seinfeld or any of those you know the most popular shows they're all formulaic yet we still love them because they you know friends and Seinfeld feel very different yet they're using the exact same structure in terms of how they're delivering their stories so it's really at the common kind of social media growth myth that we think we should come try and debunk as well at this stage yeah I would say frequency is the key to success is is just a volume play I think that that does a disservice to people as they're trying to either they're trying to start out or they're trying to find the clues to what's what succeeds because this is not about how much content we can produce it's more about how we can master the art of storytelling algorithms and more importantly people don't favor volume they favor quality so if you think about going out to Netflix like how do you choose the next TV show that you want to binge watch is it the number of episodes the link in the episodes or is it the trailer in a friend recommendation I don't know about you but it's always like either the trailer or the friend recommendation that drives it and it's the same thing like because we live in a world with social media with five billion people there's over a billion pieces of content uploaded across every social media platform every day and then you just think about the amount of content we consume from like a streaming service providers we are professional content consumers we have so much choice at our disposal we are going to favor and consume content based upon how the story impacts us the quality of story how it connects with us not because a creator produces a certain amount of content now I will say 10 years ago 15 years ago these platforms did favor frequency because social media was a lot simpler back then you know if you think about 15 years ago you know you get somebody to follow you post there's a good chance that they're going to see it today there's there's no free wins just because you have followers it doesn't mean people are going to see your content so that's a big one that I think does a disservice to a lot of people have burns people out now there is a play like frequency can play a role once you've kind of mastered your format if you want to increase it from there but when you're starting out you kind of want to master these nuances so that's definitely a myth another big one is that you need like a big team you need fancy equipment you know you need lighting and all these things when in reality if you have a phone an iPhone and it can capture a decent quality and you can tell a compelling story you can break through now there are certain formats that escalate the amount of production but it's not you don't need it to kind of drive that initial traction another big one is my industry is not sexy or interesting enough to go viral every we've worked in every industry sector taxes go viral insurance goes viral real estate goes viral nutrition goes around any subject matter can it's just the context of how you are you tell the the express the information to the audiences you're trying to reach yeah that was one of my big learnings actually looking at your website is looking at all those case studies and examples going it is every kind of sector there's a little viral I guess there's always an angle right so tell us about that so tell us about hook points tell us about the business how people can follow you how they can get in touch and what your business offers as a service because I read the book it's changing my mindset there's you've read other books that I haven't read yet and I've started getting your emails and I love all of your stuff so tell us all about it yeah so essentially what our company does is we help brands individuals find their ideal format and we do the research for them so we basically for us to break down a format takes us between 15 to 20 hours it's like that lengthy of a of a process but what we do is we help you match with your ideal format and then we break down kind of the blueprint of how to execute on it like those qualitative nuances that allow you to not we again we're not one of these people say oh this is working so go do that it's like this is working and we spend 15 to 20 hours breaking down how and why it works but more importantly when it doesn't work why it doesn't work so we really help clients with this matching process of finding their their format and then we train them in our in our creative model that we've developed over the past eight years as well yeah I love it it's such a structured approach to things that actually I can I can really see haven't read the book how that that would work in practice as well so what about people where can they follow you what's the what's the best way to get in contact they can go to hookpoint.com to learn more about it they can you know I just released my third book the guide going viral if they want to just dive more into that process they can go to hookpoint.com forward slash dmp for digital marketing podcast and they can just follow me on instagram I responded DMs on instagram linked in a produce content on youtube so we're pretty much everywhere brilliant all right well all of that will be in the show notes so targetinternet.com/podcast we'll put all of the links in there to getting contact Brendan what I've read of your stuff so far has been a bit of a complete mindset change for me and it kind of we were arguing things about four podcasts ago that I've now changed my mind on completely so thank you so much for the insights thank you for join us down there how busy you are and hopefully we'll see you again on the digital marketing podcast yeah thanks for having me it was pleasure to connect with you and everybody that tuned into this for more episodes resources to leave a review or to getting contacts go to targetinternet.com forward slash podcast