Don't create great content and then just hope the viewers will come. Find the greatest possible viewership with these strategic steps.
Most of the talk about emerging media technology revolves around new and innovative forms of media now available for consumer consumption. These technologies include video, widgets, digital social networking, RSS and podcasting. There is much ado about these new forms of media and how each is changing the ways and means by which audiences consume media. However, the point often lost in the rich conversation is the transition from the instant a producer creates a new piece of content to getting enough eyeballs on the new piece of content to matter.
Media seeding and content distribution is a new media strategy concept within the emerging media sphere that bridges the gap between content creation and mass viewership and seeks to answer this classic emerging technology dilemma:
Whoo! I just created my new widget!
Ummm, what do I do next!?!?!
The viral strategy
The original concept behind the media seeding and content distribution strategy comes from an article appearing in the May 2007 issue of Harvard Business Review. The article, entitled "Viral Marketing for the Real World" and written by Duncan J. Watts and Jonah Peretti, discusses the pitfalls of traditional viral strategy, and presents an alternative called big-seed marketing.
Originally, when a producer created a new piece of emerging media content such as a widget or a video, the strategy was to simply upload the widget or video onto a social network or video share site in the hopes that the content would gain legs. Producers relied on the concept of viral marketing, where a small group of users spread a piece of content to another group of users. That new group would then spread the content to another group, thus creating multiple growing generations of viewers. Integral to this idea of viral marketing is the concept of pass-along rates. In short, a piece of content is passed along enough times so that the final audience size is much greater than the original base of seed users. Under this understanding of viral marketing, a piece that starts with a small number of users will eventually grow from generation to generation, inevitably reaching a large audience.
However, the idea of viral marketing turns out to be more theory than practice. In reality, for every video that gets 1 million views, there are thousands upon thousands of videos that get less than a thousand views. The reason for this lies in the pass-along rate of a piece of content. Though there may be some videos or widgets that have large pass-along rates -- enabling a piece to "go viral" -- most content has low pass-along rates. With a low pass-along rate, instead of an audience growing from generation to generation, most pieces of media content will persist for a short period, then eventually die off.
In summation, by utilizing viral marketing, success becomes impossible to reproduce.