Using Viral Media to promote your brand

Just spent the past couple of days at the Social Media Summit 2009. It was jam packed with interesting speakers, workshops and other like minded delegates who were interested in learning more about Social Media and how it can assist their business.

One of highlight speakers was Dan Illic who gave an insight into the business of creating a viral video.

According to Dan Illic the person behind Downwind Media a company specialising in producing videos, a viral video is a nano story that should be designed to have a lifespan of about six hours. Downwind Media have been successfully making comments on Australian society for a number of years since Dan left his post as Associate Producer of Chanel Nine’s Australia’s Funnies Home Video.



Downwind Media has produced some edgy work including a parody of terror suspect David Hicks in a Guantanamo Bay cell and the Australia (Anti) Tourism video which poked fun at the tourism campaign by looking at some of Australia’s social problems pertaining to racial violence and mandatory detention of asylum seekers by integrating the issues into the theme of the tourism TVC. Some of the statistics for the viral were 42,000 hits in two days, 700,000 hits in 1 week and 1,5 million hits within months of the upload to YouTube. Eventually his account was unfairly suspended by You Tube for supposedly breaching Tourism Australia’s copyright on the soundtrack. In fact Dan had commissioned multiple sound tracks that sounded similar but were actually original recordings.



Once you were onto a good idea, you should also have business plans to enter the hybrid economy. This actually means you sell something physical to support the digital. Dan Illic compares viral video for a brand as non linear TV. At the last federal election, he was commissioned by Fairfax to produce a number of videos for their business website. The amusing rap video of Howard and Rudd slugging it out in a rhyme was a great example of his ability to produce content that was viral by nature. He recommends for a video to go viral it needs to use celebrity, parody and controversy, be unique, funny and edgy.

To read about the tweets search the tag #smmelb09