Some intriguing YouTube stats

According to some recent YouTube research, your video has:
- a 3.1% chance of getting over 1000 views
- 0.3 percent chance of getting over 10,000 views.
- 0.001% of getting over 100,000 views

On the flip side, you've got more chance of getting over 1000 views (3.1%), than you have of getting 0 views (2.8%).  Just.  Interestingly, the mode average for a YouTube clip is less than 50, with a staggering 65% of videos failing to get more than 50 views.

Of course, these stats cover all videos across YouTube - so you'd guess that a professionally created viral ad would fair significantly better than a bedroom video.

Additionally, these stats don't take into account the unfair advantages of seeding - using something like the Viral Ad Network and the "big seed" seeding strategy that increases the chances of getting over 100,000 by literally factors x10,000's.

Why pathetic campaigns always go viral

Whenever we're given a viral campaign to seed we have a bit of internal banter as how well we think it will do.  And as a rule, opinion is always divided.  Kirk'll like it.  Ian won't.  Rory will think it's a viral turd.  Chris will think it's a viral work of genius . . .

And someone's always wrong.  They're wrong because in each case we'll be judging it on our personal preferences.  What one person likes isn't necessarily what another likes.  And when it comes to the internet, there maybe a whole of community of "Kirks" out there - a tight-knit highly internet active community of (for example) dog lovers who like nothing better than seeing a dog dance to Gangster's Paradise.

Luckily we developed processes not to judge campaigns on personal preference.  Three key factors in objectively predicting the virality of a campaign are understanding:
1) Does the campaign "have an audience"?
2) Is this audience also an active community online?
3) Is the content relevant community in a "pathetic" way (i.e. does it have pathos / does it connect in some way)

And once these three factors have been judged, we can plan our seeding strategy - making sure we approach the relevant audiences with the right "pathetic approach".  

Sounds simple.  Well, the theory is.  However, the execution is a little more challenging - mainly due to the fact that you never 100% know where all these "community influencers" are hanging out.  So for that reason our execution strategies normally include using our Viral Ad Network - which allows us to reach out to broad communities (and niche communities) at the click of a button, allowing us to flush out the lurking relevant influencer gorilla's in the mist.  Pathos is a strangely unpredictable thing to judge correctly, and the unobvious route is often the best route to viral nirvana. (more on that later)

(+ N.B. I apologise for that terrible last gorilla in the mist mention.  It's cheap I know.  No more gorilla mentions I promise).

Obama's democracy 2.0

In the context of Senator Obama's radical and successful use of the internet to win the Presidency, commentators wildly speculated about how President Obama would then use the internet to govern.  Having amassed 1 million+ followers, would he run the first ever Twit-ocracy and use Twitter to solve his country's problems?  Would he run an enlarged collaborative People's Cabinet via Facebook?

Months into President Obama's period of governance, we now have a good sense of democracy under Obama looks like.  And both government policy wonks and web 2.0 geeks have reasons to be pleased with the direction Obama's taking American democracy.

Policy wonks should be excited about his declaration, on day two of being in office, that he was dedicated to transparent, participative and collaborative governance:

"My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government.  We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation and collaboration.  Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government."

Cue excitement from 2.0 geeks too - as obviously public participation and collaboration are values at the heart of the web 2.0 movement.  So the next question from the 2.0 community was "so what's the big man going to do?"  Given the precedent of Obama's election campaign, and the fact that the US are the richest and most tech-savvy nation (inventors of Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Amazon . . .), the expectations were certainly set high.

The reality has certainly been a lot more muted than most geeks would have liked.  Nothing overly glam and technologically ground-breaking, but instead a steady stream of pilot e-democracy projects and iterative improvements using an array of different web 2.0 tools.

A quick list of these innovations in participative and transparent governance include:

• White House Open for questions: an interactive question and answer session with the President.

• Recovery.org dialogue: a crowd-sourcing process designed to tap the IT community for ideas for implementing Recovery.gov.

• Open Government Directive collaboration: a collaborative policy-writing process to openly develop a draft of the Open Government policy.

• Data.gov: a web portal providing access to Federal government data sets.

For policy wonks the most interesting ongoing issue is how to make the concept of participative policy making work in practice - given the practical issues around integrating public crowd-sourcing into the formal policy making process.  Certainly the Recovery.org dialogue indicates that focused "expert-based crowd-sourcing" works, however there's still a question of how to make more broad "citizen-based crowd-sourcing" work effectively.

For geeks the democracy 2.0 money shot is around Obama (via his Federal CIO Vivek Kundra) opening up government data and providing data standards - meaning that government data can be more easily mined and mashed-up, handing power (in the form of structured formatted data) over to the people.

And if I were to rate Obama's democracy 2.0 so far?  Well, I'd probably give him a B+.  A promising positive start, but definitely not the finished article.

N.B. for a more in-depth account of Obama's democracy 2.0, read my briefing paper below: