INBOUND 2015 I&E: Scott Stratten "Unviral: Why Word of Mouth Needs to Change"

Hello. Hello. I like the echo. Ask not what you. Forget it. That's not a joke. Kennedy joke. Right. I'm a Jays fan. Thank you. Tough room. All right, so you saw Bernays talk. Awesome. Thank you all for coming to my 7am book signing today. None of you came. I almost didn't go. So we're gonna do a repeat performance of that after this talk. So if you want to piggyback, I'll bring you down there. Maybe I'll just buy you the book. I'm just desperate for people to come to the book signing at this point. So even if you already have it, free book. So you know. So one of the nice things about being able to talk about coming to Inbound is I got to do a talk that I don't usually do. Who has seen me do a talk before? Anyone on YouTube. Awesome. They'll make money off that. And thanks for that the Napster video. So if you did, you know. So I get very ranty. I don't usually speak behind podiums and I flail a lot with my jazz hands that threatens the man bun falling out. But it's still. I get to talk more today. Dig a little deeper on ethics, on viral marketing and my problem with it. Now understand that my background in viral marketing. I started out the UN agency by becoming one of the most successful viral video companies in the world. Back in the old days with dial up and if you think getting people to watch videos hard, now try it. When you had to dial up on the modem and your mom would pick up the phone halfway through the Download of your MP3 that took 42 minutes to download. Like, mom, it's Panama, it's Van Halen, you can hang up. So we had to keep movie file sizes down under a meg. It was all flash based. If you guys ever saw those slideshow cheesy ass motivational videos like text and pictures and horribly cheesy music in the background, that was us. I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. But they worked. They worked incredibly. They were the best inbound marketing type of thing we could have done for our clients. They got 60 million views. Back in the day when 60 views was impressive, we built lists incredibly large. I built a 360,000 person list and didn't even have anything to do with them. I didn't know what to send them. We just built this huge list on them. So I understood viral and when I understood that it was simply everybody wants viral. It makes me laugh when people come to me and say back, back when we did client work. I don't take clients anymore, by the way, so I don't want any of you. So I don't really care. I got out of the client business because I hate people. So it was a weird thing to have to work for clients, but not you guys. Everybody else outside of this room I hated. And the issue was people would come to us after they made the video and said, can you viral this up? Can you make it go viral? Like I said, some Harry Potter dust. I could just sprinkle on the thing and everybody would watch it. Viral's not a campaign. If your viral video has seven views and six of them, are you refreshing it, which you can do, like at least 132 times. It's not viral. Viral's a result. And everybody wants viral. You can't just call something everybody wants it to go viral, even if it means you want to spread it to a hundred people or a hundred thousand or a million or a billion. The point is, viral is dangerous because we start using vanity metrics for views or likes or retweets or shares or follows or fans or even hits or visits. It's people like me that can rip you off when it comes to that. We used to sell our viral videos. We made 60 of them at the end of. Everything was said and done over seven years, and we sold them. We sold a slideshow for 10 grand. Yeah, I know. And we guaranteed 50,000 views in 30 days. That's pretty sweet. Especially back in the day. I could have got 50,000 views of a picture of a cucumber because I had the list, so that didn't mean anything. You don't want 50,000 views. You want 50 highly qualified views. Be careful with the metrics. Dig deeper with them. And today I want to talk about what we're doing these days to go even crazier when it comes to this viral, you know, sudden urge for stuff. So if you want to enjoy the slides and that the top of that dude's head, we'll go from there. Yeah, I see it. You're going to be that guy. Okay, so my claim to fame other than that is this. I'm not texting or something. Now I'm going to pull it up for you. That's the no button. Anybody been to it? So all it is is this. This is the entire website. It's no.com, it's n15os.com. Why 15? Because 14 was already registered. Okay, That's a domain name joke. Work with me here. And you click the button. That's the entire website. Thank you very much for having me inbound. Take care. Don't clap. I was kidding. So I want to show you now the behind the curtain of this site. I'm just going to let that sink in for a second. 26 million sessions, almost 30 million page views, and 19 million users. I don't do anything for this site. I don't put. I outsourced the design of it, which was ripping off a photo and a sound bite. And who's a Star wars fan here? You do know that's not Darth Vader making that noise, right? That's Emperor Zurg from Toy Story. Shame on you Star wars fans for not knowing that. At least four of you should have gone, whoa, whoa, whoa, no, that's not the right sound. So we just put it up. And this has been going for six, seven years now. 10,000 visits a day doing nothing. I hate myself for this site, by the way. Like, I know you do. I hate myself. So some of the questions I have with Data is like, the average session duration is 27 seconds. It's four seconds long. What are you doing the rest of the time? 1.14 pages per session. There's only one page. I don't know where the secret Darknet pages are going afterwards. The yes button on it or something. And then the bounce rate's 91%, which to me means like 9% of people have never left the page. That's what I'm saying. It's a permanent homepage on their PC at home. So that's the one side of it. Here's all the search terms I rank for on Google. How much do you hate me right now? I rank number one in Google for every version of the word no except the word no. I should just walk off the stage right now. Seriously, type it in. You can also go to it by going to instantnobutton.com if you ever want to see it. Anytime a ball team or a sports team does poorly, I just tweet out the button, right? You can see spikes around the world, depending on which country lost in the World cup and the no button usage. It's amazing to me. And here's the countries here. Number one's the us, Russia, uk, Canada, Poland, Germany, Sweden, Ukraine, Australia, Brazil, out of the 238 countries that have used it. Now, I want you to look at this right now. And in your mind, I realized, well, you know what? That's also some of the biggest countries in the world. So that's not the right data. So I broke it down. No button usage per capita, like percentage of Internet users in those countries. So if you look at this list, just think for your second or yourself right now, which one was the highest and which was the lowest. I'll give you a second. You got your answers in your head. You're guessing which country has the most strife and pain to use the no button and which is the calmest. Okay, here we go. Ready? US, 3.5% of all Internet users have pressed the no button. Russia, 2.1%. You didn't see that coming, did you? UK 2.4. Canada. We're a passive, polite country. 3.7%. See, secretly we hate everybody, but we do it politely, right? Passive in person, aggressive online. Poland, 4%. Germany, 1.2. Sweden. What the whoa. It's just they're much more angry than we realize than Ukraine. Australia and Brazil is just barely touching it. So that kind of shows you where it's been used. Here's the top cities. Moscow, second one. People just don't want you to know they're using it. And it goes all the way down. We even have an app. It's just a button. I didn't even make it. Look at the installs. We're just at about 65,000 right now. And 1884 reviews at a four and a half star average. Do you understand how hard it is to get a good average in the Google Play in the Android Store? There are bitter people in there, bitter people who want their free apps. So it was amazing. People got on there and started giving it bad reviews and said we need a widget. I'm like, what the fuck's a widget? I have no idea what a widget is. I'm an iPhone user. And then we had the developer made one and then they came back and re reviewed it. Who does that? But they did and they came back and updated it and now we're were there. So this is all just to make you hate me so. But it's also to show you that viral. I get why people share stuff and viral simply is evoking emotion. That's it. That is your 12 month MBA course on viral marketing. That's all. When you evoke emotion, people react to it. I don't mean mildly, I mean you evoke it. Funny, angry, sad, happy, inspirational, thought provoking. But you've got to evoke something. And usually your commercial isn't what evokes it, it's an emotion. Think of what you just shared in the past day on Twitter. On Facebook. Did anybody here tweet anything from Bernays Talk? Why did you tweet evoked emotion when you say, oh, hell yes. And then you got. It's so good, you've got to tell the world or the pretend world on Twitter? That's evoking emotion. And we forget that we want to have our logo on there. We want to have this. Well, people don't spread mediocre content. That's why I've always said I don't have a blog schedule. People like, well, Scott, what's the point? Best day to share a blog post. To write a blog post. And I'm like, when you have something to say and when you don't, don't post anything. And they're like, okay, so that's like, Tuesdays. Tuesday's the good day. Are we gonna share it on Tuesdays? I'm like, no. Nobody ever shared a blog post said, you know what? This is fairly mediocre, and it's really keyword rich. I'm gonna share it because it's Tuesday. We share emotion, and you have to evoke that. Now, if your business is not in the emotional world, which most of them actually are, but you still think it's kind of dry, having something that's solid, that's great information, that's evoking emotion because people are impressed by that. Doesn't have to be sappy, doesn't have to be funny. Most brand should.