What makes something go viral? – Nieman Journalism Lab

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What makes something go viral? The Internet according to Gawker’s Neetzan Zimmerman

The machine-like blogger has generated huge traffic numbers for Gawker — paying the pageview bills so other writers can focus on less viral work.

In March, I wrote about Gawker’s new quantity-over-quality experiment. Each day, one Gawker staffer was tasked with pageview-chasing duty, a quest to post enough cat videos, Miley Cyrus pics, and local news ephemera to keep the clicks coming en masse. That staffer’s work would free up others to work on longer, more involved pieces. Pageview duty rotated, because — who could stare too long into the Internet’s bright raw id and not go blind?

Neetzan Zimmerman, apparently. Editor A.J. Daulerio hired him two months ago to focus exclusively on viral content. Zimmerman’s title at Gawker is Editor, The Internet. He is assigned to cover the Internet.

This machine-like person has generated more than 300 bylines for Gawker since he started on April 9. These are not lengthy tomes, usually; nearly every post is just a funny photo or video, with body text barely longer than a caption. The average word count of a sampling of his recent stories is about 200.

Zimmerman sits comfortably atop Gawker’s leaderboard, garnering two to five times more pageviews than his highest-performing colleagues. Zimmerman is so prolific, his posts so magnetic, that Daulerio has now relieved all 10 full-time Gawker staffers of their pageview chores.

“A taxidermied cat being that’s been turned into a helicopter — that’s clearly going to be successful, right?”

“He’s a total freak, a specialist, if you will, and I’d much rather have him (one person!) taking care of the backend of Gawker and letting the rest of us grow the site a little more traditionally,” Daulerio told me in an email. “He’s doing an outstanding job so far, now it’s a task for us to keep up and build more around him every day.”

The reaction from readers to my previous story was split between “Journalism is doomed!” and “Journalism is saved!” A lot of people interpret Daulerio’s motives as trying to figure out how to maximize pageviews. That’s true, but I think the essential question is, more precisely: Can Chinese goats subsidize substance? Canfarting babies pay the bills, so journalists can focus on real work?

Consider the reach of Zimmerman’s recent work (approximate pageviews parenthetical):

Zimmerman, 30, was previously the one-man operation called The Daily What, a Tumblr site he created in 2008 while bored at work. He’s the guy who elevatedDouble Dream Hands to meme status and Rebecca Black to global fame. (It is so documented in Know Your Meme, the paper of record for the Internet.)

The Daily What was scooped up by Ben Huh’s Cheezburger Network in 2010. In April of this year, Zimmerman parted ways with Cheezburger to get a little break from the relentless schedule and maybe pursue some more serious work. He was pumping out about 35 posts a day at The Daily What and never took a weekend off. At Gawker, he tells me, he averages 13-14 posts a day. “The least I’ve ever done was 9, and that was on an excruciatingly slow day,” he said. Weekends are mostly free now.

What makes something go viral?

Last week Zimmerman posted This Is How You Make Something Go Viral: An Impractical Guide, an essay five times the length of his usual work. I devoured it, expecting to finally learn the secret of virality. I came away unsatisfied. It seemed more like a guide to discovering — dare I say, curating — viral content, a complex system of early-warning signs that seems to make sense only in Zimmerman’s head.

He describes an Internet food chain, a series of tiers of websites that disseminate viral content. The highest-performing, most visible websites — BuzzFeed, Boing Boing, Gawker, Reddit — often graze on content discovered by lower-visibility sites. The lower-tier sites are often the ones to lift TV news bloopers or funny Facebook photos from obscurity. But they depend on their mainstream predators/enablers to elevate something to meme status. Zimmerman described his system thus:

In order to stay as current as possible, I make sure to run a spot-check of the most visible sites at least once a week. Refreshing the index with the most fruitful lower tier content sources is only half of it: Losing the dead weight is crucial as well. My rule is simple: If a site hasn’t produced at least on[e] item of value during the week, it drops down a tier. If it bottoms out and still hasn’t proven useful, it’s gone.

“In nature,” Zimmerman told me, “you can’t really say the fly or the mosquito are not as important as the animals that eat them, because they still provide sustenance for those animals…It’s the same thing with these lower-tier sites — they’re sometimes even more important.”

As in any competitive ecosystem, there are days when sustenance is scarce. On slow news days, Zimmerman wrote: “Insipid, pointless, patently unintesting and unfunny items are brought to the fore when they would otherwise remain unmissed in obscurity.”

I pressed Zimmerman to reveal precisely what it is that makes something viral. News organizations, marketers, and C-list bloggers could really use this. He talks about this vague quality called “Internet bent.”

“When I talk about Internet bent, it’s sort of, what’s viral, versus just what’s making headlines? Those tend to be two different things. When something goes viral, it tends to be something that is not expected to go viral,” he said. So when the U.S. kills al-Qaida’s No. 2 man in a drone attack, that’s a big headline, but it’s not bound to be viral content.

“A taxidermied cat being that’s been turned into a helicopter — that’s clearly going to be successful, right? Because it’s got that element of shock, it’s got that element of a cat, you know, it’s basically just tailored to the Internet,” he said. I am laughing at this point.

A Neetzan for news?

This would seem to disappoint people in news organizations who want to learn from the masters and grow their traffic. Not only is viral content so unpredictable, it tends to not really be news content. So instead of creating viral content, maybe news organizations should be aggregating viral content. Maybe every news organization needs a Neetzan Zimmerman.

But how does a Washington Post or St. Louis Post-Dispatch create its own Daily What and not look ridiculous?

“My approach to this whole thing from the start, it was…take everything that’s going on on the Internet seriously. Treat it as you would something that you might read in The Economist,” he said. “If you read Tumblr, for instance, there’s some smart people out there…They’re not dumbing down the content, but they’re still introducing it in a way that they know will be palatable to this new audience.”

As an example he points to GIF HOUND, a Tumblr site that presents the day’s news in the form of animated GIFs. Take this image that condenses a four-minuteObama campaign video about Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts jobs record:

That image reached a lot of people who might not otherwise watch the video. Maybe it compelled viewers to click through and watch the whole thing.

And then this happened:

When’s the last time someone with 16 million Twitter followers shared your content?

A.J. Daulerio, the Gawker editor, has said more than once that he does not like pageview-chasing — but, in essence, You got a better idea for paying for journalism? As he wrote last week:

I hate cats in hot tubs, cats sitting on babies, Keyboard Cats playing off babies who suck at singing, etc. Looking at them is fine. I mostly hate that, at some point, a viral video becomes the default hit-switch for a slow news day. But when your job is to grow a site’s traffic, it’s tough to ignore — and for the sake of the other writers, it’s a necessary cog.

Even if Neetzan Zimmerman could save journalism, his defect is that he’s human. Human beings wear out. Human beings want to try new things, branch out. I asked him, could he be automated? Could we turn Zimmerman into A MACHINE? He laughed and said math was his weakest subject in school. “You could probably find a way to do that.” You could write a program that checks the high-performing sites for stories and cross-checks them against other sites, dynamically ranking aggregators and awarding more points to those whose content goes viral more often.

But you can’t replicate his gut, not yet. There are no hard-and-fast rules, he said. Zimmerman’s many stories cohere somehow. They have wit and soul in a way I can’t quite describe. Robots can’t do that.

Zimmerman is skeptical that mainstream newsrooms will learn from Gawker. “They want to keep the integrity of the old guard in place, and they’re very concerned that any sort of shift from that would be seen as trying to pander,” he said. “That is something that’s going to end up with them going out of business.”

And he does not say that dismissively. Zimmerman grew up in Israel reading two national newspapers every day, cover to cover. He does not want traditional news organizations to disappear, he said, but they have to start catering to their nextaudience now.

Yelp Survey: 85% of consumers use the internet to find local businesses

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from Yelp.com

Search Engine Land’s recent Local Consumer Review Survey looked at the way consumer behavior has changed since 2010. Interestingly, one of the key findings was that most people surveyed were just as likely to turn to the internet, as they were to ask for personal recommendations about local businesses. For business owners, this is a good indication that now more than ever, it’s important to have a strong online presence. We’ve highlighted a few key takeaways from the survey below:

  • “There has been a significant jump in the number of consumers using the Internet to find local businesses, and the regularity of their ‘searches’ has also increased.” In fact, only 15% of consumers surveyed have not used the internet to find a local business in the past 12 months. This number is down from 21% in 2010.
  • The majority of consumers surveyed use online reviews to make spending decisions. 27% of consumers are regularly reading online reviews, while another 49% are occasional readers.
  • A single review isn’t likely to make or break you. In fact, 65% of consumers (vs. 58% in 2010) are reading between 2-10 reviews when researching local businesses.
  • “Appreciation and value of online reviews is growing as more consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.” According to the survey, 72% of consumers give the same weight to online reviews as they do to personal recommendations.

With that in mind, are you putting your best foot forward when it comes to Yelp? The keys to a strong Yelp presence include adding great content to the “About This Business” section of your listing, and diplomatically responding to your reviewers. If you need inspiration, Pretty Parlor of Seattle, High Tech Auto Service of Santa Monica, and Tecolote Cafe of Santa Fe, are all examples of businesses that are actively taking the aforementioned steps. Beyond that, a solid rating on Yelp begins with providing great customer service in the offline world, and then allowing reviews to build organically over time. For more tips and best practices, check out the support center at http://biz.yelp.com.

 

Cancer Research UK and social media – an innovative alliance

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The #nomakeupselfie campaign has helped to raise more than £8m for Cancer Research UK. This money will fund 10 clinical trials, an astonishing achievement.

Many articles have commented on just why the campaign was so successful, from its mobile nature to the emotional triggers pulled by shared photographs.

What hasn’t been covered is just how Cancer Research UK dealt with such a large amount of social action. How does the team to react and capitalise on what some may think amounts to a black swan event?

I spoke to Aaron Eccles, senior social media manager at Cancer Research UK and asked him about the campaign. Here’s what I learned.

The team

There’s a core social team of four or five people with community management run in shifts. Crucially, there’s a rota for out-of-hours, too.

The #nomakeupselfie trend was noticed late one evening and the team jumped on it, making sure they were front of mind early on. This helped to clear up some of the confusion around what charitable activity the selfies were encouraging, as some of the early social activity didn’t specify a charity or a way to donate.

The community management shifts are undertaken by senior exec level staff or higher, so the team is well skilled in responding appropriately to a range of questions.

If unsure about what response to give, there’s an email address to solicit advice from colleagues across the team. As is best practice for responding on social media, the team is encouraged to acknowledge direct questions even if an answer may be delayed. Out of hours, the team can confidently let users know that a question will be looked into and a conversation picked up again in the morning.

Audience led activity

The community management team try to be audience led. For example, there may be a storyline on a soap opera involving cancer.

Noticing these kinds of trends allows the team to work more on the front foot, making sure they are visible around topical conversations.

Cancer Research UK will be asked questions around the subject matter and they will respond, often directing the majority of enquiries to information already available on its website.

The Cancer Research UK website has plentiful content on a range of issues. Audience questions are often recurring, hitting subjects that have been discussed or detailed on site already. That means the job of the social team is often to educate users with information already available.

Most of the early questions around #nomakeupselfie asked of Cancer Research UK were ‘Is it your campaign?’ That leads us on to the next point.

Agile content formats

It can be slow adding new content to the website, getting approval and creating the pages. So, the blog team often writes a post up quickly, answering some key questions that are asked repeatedly on social media, such as questions about #nomakeupselfie.

Q&A patterns emerge, such as people asking how the money from the selfie campaign is being spent. These questions are answered, see this blog post as example, and even represented in a FAQ format.

Involving the marketing team

The vast public response was unexpected by the Cancer Research UK team, and they were caught unawares, as the campaign was not theirs.

After meeting with the broader marketing team to discuss how to best respond and capitalise on the trend, several decisions were taken. Among these, for example, was making sure that search share was taken by using PPC.

Reacting quickly

On seeing that too much traffic to the Cancer Research donations page was preventing people from donating, the team decided to push some people towards the charity’s JustGiving page, as well as to text donations.

Mobile becomes integral

In the end, the majority of the donations were given via mobile, by text message.

The mobile nature of the phenomenon has been documented already. It’s a key trend for charities, not only can donations be made by mobile (that’s not necessarily new) but content is increasingly consumed on phones, and social interaction takes place there.

The ability for photographs, sharing, nominations and donations to be managed by a smartphone is something that the team expect to continue to greatly influence charitable giving.

Social network use and demographics

Twitter is useful to the team because it is so responsive. #nomakeupselfie was first spotted here, almost in real-time.

Facebook is the most successful social network for Cancer Research UK, through scale and demographics. Generally, an older demographic donates to charity than that which uses Instagram, for example.

Having said that, in the event of such a popular campaign, the charity found there were indeed many donations from Instagram users, as young people were reached and affected by the cause.

Dealing with negativity

Fighting fires is something that isn’t as much as an issue as one might think. As previously suggested, there are many responses already signed off for persistent questions.  Many questions asked on the back of #nomakeupselfie were already familiar, for example a small group of people suggesting cannabis is a cure that is being ignored.

Again, if the team felt that a response was necessary, when asked a question, they could direct the person to content already on site.

Mostly, the sentiment around this campaign was so positive that the public did the fire fighting, making clear to negative commenters that the campaign was positive and not the place for cynicism.

Nominations key to amplification

Celebrities played a big part in getting press coverage for the selfies. However, the key to the enormous number of donations and the sizeable amplification on social was nominations. The fact that social media users were tagging friends and encouraging a chain reaction of donations was more important than any other dynamic.

Why a Good Website Design is so Important: Stats and Figures to Prove it

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A lot of thought and hard work goes into building a successful website. Today’s users demand fast load times, valuable content, professional aesthetics, and HTML5′s interactivity.

Why Good Website Design is So Important: The Stats and Figures to Prove It

If you haven’t kept up with the latest trends in website design, you’ve probably seen your traffic dwindle. You may have even seen negative growth. That’s unacceptable in a world where most small to medium sized businesses rely on the Internet for selling products and communicating with their customers.

When it comes to building traffic and keeping visitors on your page, load time plays a primary role. The faster your site loads, the faster traffic will grow. Faster load times also mean lower bounce rates. If it takes more than a few seconds for a page to load, visitors bounce off your site and move on.

Of course, good website design isn’t all about the backend. You need a site that functions properly, but you also need designs that look appealing.

As good website design has become more important, it has also become more complicated. In the 1990s, a bright business owner could figure out how to make a simple website that would keep customers happy. It didn’t require much.

A lot has changed since then. The idea that a business owner could run a company and manage a useful website at the same time is absurd. That’s why so many companies have turned to professionals to help them meet their performance goals.

It turns out that hiring those experts makes sense. The numbers show just how important good design. (click to enlarge)

Credit: Instashift.com

Dom Zimmerman

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From Dom Zimmerman: Finding the Keywords that Matter

The SEO industry is constantly changing. From algorithmic updates and spam reduction to best practices for authorship and schema.org vocabulary to microdata for semantic markup, there’s always something to keep us on our toes. As mentioned in SEO’s role in content creation, we’re lucky enough to provide SEO services to some truly awesome clients. And today we’re starting a multi-part blog series thats shares some of the tips and best practices we’ve learned along the way.

Every SEO needs a toolset that they can rely on. But with options including keyword trends and competitiveness, ranking tools, site crawlers and link analysis – not to mention the latest in domain-based social signals and optimization – it can be hard to know where to start.

It’s also important to boil this toolset down to something any marketing professional can use to complement other areas of online visibility. Just like every SEO needs a keyword tool set, campaign managers, creatives and copywriters need to know what people are looking for in search.

Read on for a few keyword research tools anyone can use to yield fresh insights during campaign ideation and messaging creation. And if nothing else, remember this: always look for ideas and key phrases that have the power to resonate in search.

1. Be aware of search trends, rising searches and social search data. Google Trends is a great place to start. Information on rising trends, yearly search volume data and other related terms will get you on your way with research and might even give you some fodder for upper management when it comes to content and campaign ideation.

Social signals at a domain and page level are also very important in terms of ranking. Free tools such as Topsy can complement your more robust social listening tools with a quick view of what type of keyphrases are being used socially to influence your selections.

2. Use search engine data to complement your ideas. To begin with, run a keyword idea through Ubersuggest, a great tool based on the Google Suggest API (the feature that anticipates your search query based on popularity). By filtering out your keyword by language, you can then create a list based on Suggest ideas and run those through the Google keyword API to determine approximate search volumes and competitiveness.

3. Identify search volumes and relative competitiveness. The good ol’ Google Adwords Keyword tool has been the go-to for years as a simple place to start for search volumes. This tool, however, will be sunsetting very soon and will be replaced by the Keyword Planner. While the Adwords Keyword tool showed stats for broad, phrase and exact match, the Keyword Planner will give you only exact match (you should be using this match type for SEO purposes). The Keyword Planner also gives average number of searches for a keyword idea on all devices (desktop, laptops, tablets and mobile phones) as opposed to just desktop by default.

The Takeaway
Keyword insights aren’t just valuable in SEO. It’s powerful tool that can extend across your entire marketing mix, helping inform and refine your campaigns and content.

It can be difficult to know where to start, but once you’ve narrowed down your list based on relevancy, global and local monthly volumes and relative approximate competitiveness, you’ll have a much clearer sense of where your cross-channel optimization opportunities lie.