29 Minutes of Virality Secrets That Will Explode Your Business this Year

So let's dive in. So after 17 years going on, 18 years of canvassing the entire social ecosystem, analyzing billions of views and tens of thousands of videos, we have cracked the code on content creation. And what we have found that most brands have been doing it wrong for the past decade. And if brands don't fix this, they're gonna struggle to be relevant in two to five years from now. So what we're going to do today is to avoid that. Now the question is, why would throwing things against the wall just work with human beings? That's often what we see with our clients as it pertains to organic, social, and going viral. And this is a really important thing. Everything that we're covering today is. It's not about quantity, it is about quality. So these myths about frequency and posting multiple times a day and everything, that is not the model that we're going to break down today. And that's not the success that we've had. So content doesn't go viral when a creator gets lucky. And I know it seems that way when you have these TikTok influencers or these YouTube stars building a massive audience, but content goes viral when a creator truly understands the science behind virality. This is a staggering fact. There's now over 4,4 billion content creators on the planet. Myself and all of you here. We're fighting for the same attention. We no longer live in a world where we're just competing against our direct competitors. We're competing against every piece of content produced.

We're competing against espn, Netflix, Kevin Hart, Kim Kardashian. That pesky teenage influencer down the street, Katt Williams, is another good one. We're competing directly with all of it.

So let's break down how we can actually win this fight, because it seems pretty daunting, but it is winnable. So let's dive in first with the algorithms, because this is a big thing. Algorithms control reach and distribution of content. So an algorithm determines whether your video is seen by 1,000 people or 10 million people, and they are favored to only do one thing. There's a lot of myths that, oh, the algorithms are suppressing my reach on purpose to get me to pay for boosting my post, or my account is shadow banned or those things. But the reality is, is you're not playing to what the algorithms want. And what they want is one singular thing.

That is retention. How do these social media algorithms make money? Well, the longer you spend on the platform, the more ads they can serve, the more profit that you will generate.

So they are Always going to favor content that plays to that fundamental goal of holding people's attention for as long as possible. So we can't beat the algorithm. We're not talking about hacks here to beat algorithms, but we can partner with them to play to their business goals and objectives so that we can get that scale and reach that we're all looking for. And the truth is, it is pretty simple, but it's not easy. We just make content that the algorithms love. That's all you have to do. That's how you get your content to go viral. I know that's probably not helpful. We're going to dive into the science of how to do it in a minute. But learning how to do this isn't easy. But the process that we're going to walk through today is very simple. So our model is built to understand and adapt to how the algorithms work, and we have the data to prove it. So for the content that we've worked on, our team has generated over 60 billion views and 100 million followers and a billion in revenue off of organic social media. And some people ask, well, how does this, how does playing, going viral play into my business objectives? How does it generate revenue? Well, let's just say that your average video Today is generating 10,000 views a post. Imagine if it was 10 times that size, 100 times that size, 1,000 times that size. What impact would that have on your bottom line? That is the real opportunity here. And this is how you work with the algorithms to see results. So there's three core pillars.

So the first one is grabbing attention. Grabbing attention. You're able to rise above the noise, because if you think about it, if we can't get somebody to stop in the first three seconds to stop the scroll, click, the thumbnail and headline, well, we have no chance.

Attention with substance attracts the most value from your content. We're not talking about clickbait here. We're not talking about tricking people. There actually has to be substance to the content, and then the third is monetizing attention. Attention is monetized once or maximized once you monetize it. Now, that's not saying every post should be selling something, because we have to get people to know, like, and trust us first. But there has to be a solid business foundation and business model on the back of it. So these three things equate to viral marketing at scale. And one of the important things I want to just stress is I'm not talking about prank videos, I'm not talking about silly cat videos or Doing things that are against your brand or your subject matter, because then that third core pillar would fall apart. If we're just going viral off of content that's not related to our brand, it's not going to translate into ROI and revenue. So creating content that grabs and holds attention is your goal as a content creator. Now let's break down exactly how we do that. Mastering creating content that gets people to stop scrolling and watch it longer than your competitors content. We do this by constantly creating content that performs up to the algorithm standard. So again that we make the algorithms our partner because we're playing to their revenue goals, so they will serve it to as many people as possible. We've seen this time and time again. We are the algorithm's product. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, they're not Netflix, they're not investing billions of dollars in original content. We are their business model. So they want to help us succeed. In our experience of doing this since 2005, there's really only one proven model for becoming an expert at creating content that the algorithm will love. And this is our process. So there's three elements to this process. Our viral content model, a qualitative analysis for viral formats, and our communication algorithm. So let's dive into the viral content model. So this is the frustrating thing that we find with creative. If we look at any other industry, like science or the medical industry, or even nutrition, you're leveraging centuries of trial and error and data to advance the innovation in that specific field. But when it comes to content creation, all those valuable data points are essentially thrown out the window in the pursuit of originality. Why? Because most people think that originality overcomes functionality and performance and it just doesn't. You do not have to be extremely original as we go into this. And to make matters worse, the traditional creative model that most brands are following today is completely outdated. So this is what we find in working with most companies, the creative model that they're following. They have brand guidelines. Typically they are very formal. Sometimes they're just in a Google Doc, sometimes they're just in the head. And those brand guidelines then dictate the ideas that we pursue, the ideas that we pursue to try and go viral. Then typically it goes to monthly and quarterly content plans. So we're batch producing content for the entire month, the entire quarter, and then we batch produce it and then post it. And then if you do your reviewing results monthly or quarterly, and then you start the process all over again. The problem with this, if you're trying to consistently go viral is it minimizes the impact. Data and research. If we go back, where does the data and research come in? Well, there's no research in here and the data comes in at the end. We're letting brand guidelines dictate everything. It pushes content creators to chase trends, burn themselves out, producing hundreds of pieces of content that underperform, not achieving their goal, and it's completely reactive. There is no process in place for accountability, for iteration, for learnings on each piece of content produced. And this is where your chances of going viral is highly dependent on luck. And this is where most people are failing in terms of really scaling their audience and breaking through with content performance. So what does work? So this is the viral content model that we developed. It starts with research. And I'm going to actually walk you through an exercise today of how we actually do this research. We're essentially looking at the larger social ecosystem to understand what is working, what is not working, so that we can identify what storytelling patterns or structures are best fit for our brand. That will knock out a lot of time. So when we come up with ideas, those ideas are based upon our learnings of what is working today and what is not working. So we can knock out a lot of time, a lot of energy, a lot of resources wasted. I'm producing 10, 20, 100 videos that we could have just already seen. It wasn't going to work in the research phase. And then another important part is single production iteration. This means we produce a single piece of content at a time. Why do we do this? Because we want to review the granular results. We want to understand in our research, did we understand what was working? Did we live up to what the research told us? Because if you follow this model, your content will not work for only two reasons. One, in the research, you paid attention to the wrong things, or two, you just didn't. What this means in terms of research in a little bit. So why this works? As I mentioned, the foundation is based upon research. It's not about our affinities as creators of what we want to do. Obviously, we need to be passionate about the content we're creating, but. But we're letting the data and the research guide us on what is the best way to express the message that we want to share with the world. It provides data back, competitive analysis that is required for consistent content breakthroughs. And it avoids this common boardroom conversation that we see all the time is we have really smart people, we have a lot of great ideas, but nothing's breaking through. What is wrong and as I mentioned a few times, this significantly saves you a ton of money, a ton of time, and a ton of resources, because you're only producing content when you know the principles that are going to cause it to work. So as I mentioned, this model has been successfully applied to creating content that has generated 60 billion views and 100 million followers. And I just want to point out that this has consistently worked for people with zero views and zero followers. It's worked with major brands and celebrities as well. But you don't have to be a major celebrity, a brand, a notable figure in order for this to work. So that's the massive opportunity for all of us today. So now I'm going to dive into our qualitative analysis of viral formats. And what I want to do is define the difference between a trend and a format, because I'm sure a lot of people in this room have heard the word trend. So a trend is a post or a topic or an idea that's hyped or popularized for a limited period of time. So it has a limited shelf life. Versus a format is a storytelling structure that is designed to work for any subject matter and it can last for years or decades.

I started my career in the film industry and if you think about any movie, it uses the same three act structure. Doesn't matter the genre, action, horror, comedy, drama, sci fi. The past 80 years has been using this same format to create content. So if you think about Steven Spielberg.

When he's making a movie, he's not.

Reinventing the three act structure because if he did, he wouldn't be a master storyteller.

So this is the simple truth about going viral. It's mastering a single format. Going viral isn't about producing as much content as possible. The right hashtags, the time of day, how many times a day you post. It's about focusing your time and energy and resources on becoming world class at executing a single top performing format. And you see this across the board with the top influencers and content creators on the planet. If you look at a Mr. Beast, a Vox, Vice magazine, any of these companies, they have mastered their format and they keep using it year after year after year because that allows them to become a world class storyteller. Let's dive into our research and qualitative analysis. So one of the big mistakes that we see people doing is they're focused just on the quantitative meaning. Over the past decades, brands just really look at their views, their likes, their shares, but that's simply not enough because it tells you Whether something has worked or hasn't worked, but it doesn't tell you why. And that's what our process does, is the why behind it.

So at hook point, we spent, we.

Have a whole team of researchers and.

All we do on this research team is we research top performing formats to glean these qualitative insights so that our clients can have the consistent results, breakthrough results. So we're gonna actually do this, we're gonna break this down so you can actually visually see this. So there's hundreds of formats out there. Our team's probably done analysis of 150 different formats at this point. It takes us about two days to do this process. So this is an example of a format. It's called the visual metaphor format. So in this visual metaphor format, there's three major elements. There's an abstract or complex topic, there's a visual representation of the topic with physical objects, and then there's a verbal explanation of the topic. So we're gonna watch a video from Dr. Julie Smith. This generated 9.3 million views. This is on TikTok. So if you think TikTok is just about teenage influencers dancing, this is a clinical psychologist killing it on TikTok. So let's watch an example of the visual metaphor format.

Don't make this mistake. When you're working on your own happiness, imagine this is you and this is your life. But like most people's lives, there are problems that can make it toxic. If a fish is living in a toxic environment, eventually it gets sick. So you take her out of the dirty water and put her in a new tank for a while. Kind of like how you take a break, you go on holiday for a few weeks into a new environment and it helps. Everything gets better and feels great for a while until you return to and go right back to that toxic situation again. And it doesn't matter how clean the water was on your break or how refreshed you feel, eventually you will get sick again. If you want to thrive in the long term, you have to focus on cleaning up the environment that is affecting you every day. I'm a psychologist. Follow for more.

So again, this is an example of a storytelling format, visual metaphors. And there's hundreds of these formats across each platform. So she's using an abstract or complex topic, she's using a visual representation of that topic with physical objects and then she's explaining it. But now we're going to do a fun little quiz exercise here. So we're going to go through her content through our Process, our qualitative process. And we call this gold, silver, bronze. So what we do is we look at a creator like this, look at the format that they're using, and we put it in an Excel spreadsheet. And what we do is we look at their highest performers, their average performers, and their low performers. Because most people would look at a successful content creator and just say, oh, I see what they're doing. I'm just going to do that. But if you just look at the successes, you won't glean the insights of what is actually driving the performance. So we cross analyze the high performer against the low performer to identify what is the difference in the way that she's telling these stories. So what we're going to do now is I'm going to play two videos, same creator, same format. And what I want you to do is, as you watch these, think about which one performed best.

Imagine this is you, and these are all the bad things that happened to you. So each one represents a memory of traumatic experiences that you've been through. And as you go about your life, the thing seems like it's overflowing. Memories just keep falling out when you don't want them to, emotionally overwhelming you. And you can't seem to focus on the rest of your life. So what can we do about it? Well, I'm a psychologist, and this is what happens in trauma therapy. First of all, a therapist would gear you up with all the skills that you need to manage just how painful those memories can be. And then you take one memory at a time, carefully open it up at your own pace and allow you to process that memory. And then you can neatly fold it up. You do the same with the next one and the next one, until what you're left with is a neat little pile of memories that fit neatly at the bottom, leaving you more capacity to focus on the life that you want to have today.

So that's the first one. Now, as you watch the second one, just think about which one performed better.

Imagine for a moment that you're stood in front of a busy road with traffic going both ways, and each of those vehicles represents a thought or a feeling coming in and out of your mind. Now, you might be like most other people and spend a good deal of your time in the middle of that road trying to direct the traffic that there are some thoughts you want to hold on to, right? And there's others that you want to push away. But doing that causes more stress because the traffic just keeps on coming. Now, if I asked you to just step back from the curb and watch the traffic instead of trying to control it, just allowing it to pass and watching as it goes. That would be the process of mindfulness. When you notice that you're trying to hold on to certain thoughts and push others away, see if you can step back from the traffic and let it pass.

Okay, great. So let's see a show of hands. How many of you think this one performed better? Okay, great. How many people think this one performed better? Okay, well, most of you got it right. The one that was on Your left generated 12 million views. The one on the right generated 130,000 views. Now, the important thing is this is the exact same creator, the exact same storytelling format. So what's the difference? So let's go through this qualitative analysis process. Well, on the first one, the high performer, there is a clear visual story that involves manipulation of the object, demonstrating the topic of the video. She's actually manipulating the object in the papers, in the trash bag, versus in the underperformer. There's just cars sitting there. She's not doing anything with it. She's not leveraging it. She's not doing anything. She's asking you to imagine it.

There's a clear tension in the high performer. Just having the basket on the screen overflowing subconsciously, that's creating tension that's holding her attention. What is going to happen? Something's going to happen with this trash can. I don't know what, but I am.

Going to do it.

And a lot of the stuff that we're talking about happens subconsciously, happens within seconds.

Then the potential energy within the first second. The basket and pile of papers hint to the viewer that there will be some type of interaction with it versus with the cars. There is no promise of interaction with those physical objects. The high performer is very clever. They're using everyday items in terms of paper and waste basket, something that we use every day, versus the other one. Not so clever. There's just a bunch of toy cars that are sitting there on that. So this is the process that we go through in identifying what's the difference between a high performer and a low performer. That gives us clues and indications of what is going to work when we try and tackle the same format. Now, the interesting thing about this is I'm not talking about her content and what she's talking about. This is all context. Contextual. This format could be used for any genre, any industry. She's a clinical psychologist. But the same visual metaphor format could be used for nutrition it could be used for fitness, it could be used for entertainment, any type of industry out there. So this process that I just took you through is when we're analyzing content, we look at over 50 different performance drivers and we typically dial it into like four or five of the most important ones. So we look at visual elements, storytelling elements, delivery environment, facial cues, body expressions, all that. So we go super deep into this qualitative analysis, this research that allows us to truly understand what makes something go viral. So another interesting thing that we have is the communication algorithm that I'm really excited to share with you today. So it's based on a proprietary data set that we have access to of 1.5 million communication assessments done worldwide. And what it shows us is that most content that brands produce is connecting with less than 70% of their core target audience. So they're only connecting with 30% of the people that they're trying to convince to perform some type of action. So this is causing brands to lose millions and millions of dollars, whether it's paid or organic. So our communication model turns communication into a mathematical formula and this is what it looks like. But don't get overwhelmed. I promise I'll break all of this down. So there's six different ways that people perceive your content and brand today. And you'll see these percentages next to each of them. So the largest subset of the population is feeling based, it's 30%. So this subset of the population is going to connect with your brand, buy your products or services for follow your account based on how it emotionally makes them feel. The second largest subset of the population is fact based, it's 25%. It's not about how it feels for them. They want it to make sense. They want data, information, time frames, who, what, when, where, why. The third largest is fun based, 20%. So for them, they just want to be stimulated, they want excitement, they want engagement with the content. 10% is value based. For them it's do I trust this brand? Do I believe in what they're saying? Are they dedicated to me as a consumer? 10% is imagination based, they're reflective on the world. So the best analogy I could give you for that is Albert Einstein, if you've ever read biographies on him, he would stare out the window for hours on end reflecting on the world and everything that he was working on to come up with his best theories. So these people like to take, they like direction given to them. And then the smallest subset of the population, 5%, is action based. So the best analogy I could give you is if anybody has seen Tom Cruise and Mission Impossible, what is he doing? He's not feeling, he's not thinking, he's not believing, he's running, he's jumping off the side of airplanes, buildings. He's just going, going, going, going. So imagine this scenario. You have your marketing director and you have your customer. And on paper they look the exact same. Both females, same age range, high income earners, university educated. However, if we look at their communication structure, it's different. So as you'll see, there's different lengths of bars. So the length of bar dictates their strength and the short of the bar dictates their weakness. Us as individuals, we have access to all six different ways, but we predominantly communicate and create our content based upon how we perceive the world. So in this instance, the marketing director is perceiving the world through action. Remember, action is 5% and the consumer that she's trying to connect with is feeling based. So the marketing director will probably create content that is move fast, get it now, this is the best you're going to miss out versus the customer just wants to know how this product's going to make them feel. So it's no fault of the marketing director because she doesn't have the level of awareness. You have that level of awareness. You can overcome this core problem. Most of us as content creators again are creating content based on how we perceive the world instead of the largest subset of the population. As a result, we're typically alienating a significant percentage of our core customer base by communicating just in the way that we like to communicate.

Because the goal is how do we take it from imbalanced communication to, to balance communication.

Now, if you want to do a.

Fun little homework, Pixar uses this in all their movies. They don't talk about it. So if you watch other movies, for example, inside out with the characters in the girl's head, they have designed a character for each different way that people perceive the world. And that is one of the reasons that Pixar is so successful, because you go into a Pixar movie and there's.

Such a diverse audience there. So having this level of balance in your communication, your content allows you to go back to where we started of grabbing attention, holding attention and monetizing attention with clarity, purpose and intent. So just some quick case studies as we wrap up here to give you an example, as I mentioned, this works with people that have no social media experience. So we worked with a leather craftsman, no social media experience. 2000 followers on TikTok and we took them through this process of doing the research, understanding what would be the best format for him. And we designed a format with him called Is it Worth It? So he was a leather craftsman, very niche, multi generational. And in this format, what we did is, again, it's called Is it Worth it? He would buy a 500 Chanel handbag or a Prada handbag and he would deconstruct it on screen and tell you whether it was worth the money that you paid for it. This simple format took him. Now he's over 850,000 followers on TikTok. He's probably gonna hit a million in like two months. But it also was a massive translator into revenue. So he did no CTAs in any of his content. He just had a link in his bio. And from that link he started generating 100,000 organic visitors a month. Sold out all of his inventory. And it was so successful that he actually created a subsequent business out of it. So again, you don't have to have the experience, you just have to understand and follow this process. A vitamin supplement company that we worked with took them through the same process, took one of their business lines from 10,000amonth to 8 million. Brand new YouTube channel. One of the first videos generated 10 million views. Instagram followers exploded. And the most important thing is their revenue increased by over 30%. So this is what we covered today as a wrap up. Creating content isn't luck, it is a science. We talked about understanding how the social media algorithms work, how to make content the algorithms will love. We talked about a simple truth to consistently going viral, mastering a single format. And we broke down our hook point viral content model. So again, content does not go viral when a creator gets lucky. Content goes viral when the creator understands the science behind virality. So that's all I got for you today. If you guys want to shoot the QR code, I'll move out of the way and you can get access to the slides we went over today. Thank you, man, that was great.

Thank you very much.