What spreads? The FUNNY spreads!
People like to share funny emails, funny pictures, funny stories, funny videos, funny blogs. Why?
There is no complicated, structured or academic answer to that. It’s simple – when you combine a hilarious piece of information with a tinge of notoriety (or vice versa), people talk about it. Firstly, it tickles their funny bone and secondly, this is I believe is a social impact of viral marketing, your credibility and likability goes up when you spread a piece of genuinely funny news.
In 2006, the Daily Mail documented history’s Top 10 Viral Videos that had been the butt of endless jokes.
Top 10 Viral Videos
1 Star Wars Kid (900 million)
2 Numa Numa (700 million)
3 One Night In Paris (400 million)
4 Kylie Minogue for Agent Provocateur (360 million)
5 The Exploding Whale (350 million)
6 John West Salmon Bear Fight (300 million)
6 Trojan Games (300 million)
8 Kolla2001 (200 million)
9 AfroNinja (80 million)
10 The Shining Redux (50 million)
- Taken from the Daily Mail
If you do a Google search on any of the video titles, you will realise that the top few results are all video results. What you can derive from this is that videos, especially YouTube videos, are a very effective way of gaining favourable positions in the Google search engine. Simply cut and paste a video code into your blog or website and you’re a notch up in Google’s favour.
*Can you imagine the number of hits on your website if you were the originator of L.M.A.O videos like these? Well, it doesn’t have to be crude or notorious, it can be smart funny or tongue-in-cheek.
Go to YouTube and look up the Star Wars Kid. The comments are fresh! As of time of posting, the last comment for the video below was 9 hrs ago. A different variation (and there are many variations) of this video had its last comment 22 mins ago. There is no ephemeral quality to videos and especially a video with good content, it becomes timeless.
Now here’s how Ghyslain Raza became the Star Wars Kid:
Filed under: The Funny, examples, funny, Star Wars Kid, viral video marketing
