Damien Mulley

Clever. Oxfam got the students of the FÃ?S Television and Video Course in Tralee to make a video and have now stuck it on YouTube. Here it is:

This is in order to promote their Christmas offerings. Oxfam emailed Irish bloggers and asked us to spread the news as part of a viral push. I wouldn’t however class this as viral and even getting bloggers to put it on their blogs (like I’m doing) isn’t viral. The Viral tips I linked to yesterday would give a better idea on how to make this viral. I’m sure there is a little reward to the person in spreading the video but is it enough? Does it cause enough of a reaction from the viewer to get them to send it on to more people?

I do like the page which allows you to pick a banner to support them, which gives a nice choice and makes it easy by including the HTML for the banners.

James has also blogged about Oxfam and included the video. Like him, and as I said, I don’t think it is viral. So, an example of viral? Viral is the Threshers Offer that Hugh Macleod pushed out. Now that has some great viral elements.

• Easy to spread: Just email, IM, blog the link to the voucher or the voucher itself.
• Snowball effect: The more Threshers is selling out of stuff, the more attention the offer is getting, the more it spreads…
• Reward/Ego/Power:
  You have that little bit of power over your friends by being the one to get them the discount by forwarding the link to them.
  In turn, your friends then too want to feel this power and send it on to their friends.
  You get that little kick of “getting one over on the man” since it looks like a “big business didn’t want you to have it but now they can’t stop it” type feel to it.
  You are in a special group since not everyone knows about the offer, for a little while you a more important that the general populace.

The Oxfam video has the easy to spread bit but the reward/ego/power part is quite weak. Still, I’m sure a charity viral is hard to do and you can’t be spreading something that helps getting one over on the starving kids. I guess what you’d need for a charity viral is build up some story and have a twist at the end that upsets/shocks/causes emotion, so much so that the viewer sends it on so their targets in order for them to experience what they just experienced.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 6th, 2006 at 12:26 pm and is filed under blogs, irishblogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.