We were having a conversation with our chief marketing guru from Systems Marketing Solutions and and he brought up a good question. Nobody knows how to create viral videos on demand, right? In the same way does anybody really know how to create a hit song or hit Jingle? He had the view that they were somewhat similar in that if you consider a viral video and a hit song a purple cow, you can’t just keep producing that same purple cow and hope that it’s a hit, Viral or otherwise. But I contend that over the years, assuming one has the raw musical talent and ear, you can learn through trial and error how to build a hit song or jingle until it gets to that sweet earworm spot looks like a prodigious fiction writer like say, James Patterson, figure it out over the years how to layout The plot of a book in such a manner that it builds and hooks you in a way that makes the book very satisfying. When I wrote my first song at the age of 15, while I was very excited about it, it took me about two weeks to realize it totally sucked. But then as I got into the professional music business through live performance and studio performance and writing, I realized there’s a trick to the trade. Like anything else it relies on mimicking other writers who are successful, learning their basic structure, what kind of Melodies are emotional and stick with listener, and finally how to produce it so it sounds like million dollar hit single.
Don’t get me wrong… Once you have the chops, Great songs, Great musical pieces can just…happen in about 20 minutes. And that is a real yet rare thing. Well videos that go viral on social media always seem to just happen. That’s the sheer beauty of them. I think there are people out there that try to quantify a viral video and backwards engineer them to try to have success, but my knowledge there haven’t been any really successful books on how to create a viral video... although there is this really interesting article written by Karen X. Cheng that gives you tremendous advice about how you get it out there once you have your video. But picking the right subject matter? Producing just the right video? Nobody seems to know.
OK that’s a lot of words. And a very interesting debate.