Harmonic Aftershock

Hashtags Everywhere.

Hashtags have quickly become the universal currency for online conversation and, increasingly, are showing up just about everywhere. We’ve seen them over the past 18-24 months crop up as lower thirds on TV shows, then TV spots – even getting built into the names of TV shows – but now they’ve delightfully infiltrated our physical spaces from football fields and behind home plate…to the sky.

This past weekend, it was hard to miss the sky’s of Boston where a number of giant #GOSOX hashtags appeared as skywriting, reminding all of us that a backchannel conversation was happening on Twitter as fans watched the Boston Red Sox play the Toronto Blue Jays – too bad they lost.

This post was cross-posted with Hill Holliday's Blog.

A new social TV web series…

With Social TV (the book) published, I’m psyched to have partnered with Lost Remote (the leading source for social TV news) and The Pulse Network (an awesome video production/digital events company) on a new web series, The Pulse on Lost Remote.

The series aims to highlight some of the top social TV headlines in an easily digestible format. A new webisode will launch on Lost Remote every other week and I hope gets better each time.

Check out the first one – I’d love to know what you think. And if you dig it, would you share it? ;-)

 

What makes a video go viral?

The video of 32-year-old Jeremiah McDonald having a conversation with his 12-year-old self is making its rounds within the social web.

While currently at 1.6 million views after just day, the media is hailing it as a “viral video” success. But what’s interesting is as I took a look at Jeremiah’s YouTube channel, I noticed that he a did similar video about a year ago (3000 views)…and also 5 years ago (14,000 views).

11 Months Ago

5 Years Ago

So I wondered why these other two videos with the same exact concept which used the same “12 year old self” source footage didn’t also virally spread like the most recent one. A few observations:

• The most recent video is much more professionally edited.
• YouTube was in its infancy 5 years ago (but not a year ago).
• Mainstream media is, of late, in a love affair with trending videos/topics.
• Many more people are using social media causing content to spread faster.
• Jeremiah specifically asked his 13k YouTube subscribers to "Please share this one."

With that said, it would seem that his past videos could have been re-discovered and re-ignited just the same as doing a new one – and reaffirms the notion that having a video “go viral” is large part content for sure…but also a whole lot of luck and timing with people (and media) having engaged social followings inspired to share interesting content.