I’m at NCVO’s Multimedia Explained event today and this morning we had a really interesting session with Julie Dodd from Public Zone looking about how organisations can create viral videos.

Julie’s 5 top tips for creating viral videos:

• Keep them short (1-2 minutes maximum). 

One of the other workshops from the day said that when a video gets to around 52 seconds most people switch off or fast forward to the end to see what happens, so make sure that by the time yours hits 52 seconds something interesting has happened.

• Make sure it’s well edited

This doesn’t mean that it needs to be high quality but it does need to be edited well.  Free tools are available such as Windows Movie Maker on PCs, iMovie on Macs and others at http://sourceforge.net/softwaremap/trove_list.php?form_cat=256.

• Is it surprising or exciting? 

If not, then are people really going to want to look at it and share it?

• Make it shareable   

Host your video on a site like You Tube, Facebook or Vimeo so that’s it easy for people to link to it, embed in their own sites/blogs and share with friends.

• Part of a wider strategy 

Your video won’t go viral if you haven’t thought through what you’re going to do with it after it’s made.  Think through the marketing strategy as a whole before you even get to the stage of making your video.

Good luck!