The Anatomy of my Viral Video

A few days ago, I was sitting at my desk when my roommate, Scott, got my attention. I turned around to see that one of my cats, Sophie, had climbed up under her own steam and perched rather adorably on top of his head and was watching what he was doing on his computer. I, of course, thought this was hilarious, and managed to whip out my phone in time to capture a 1:15 long video clip of her sitting there and readjusting herself into a more comfy position.

I posted it on Facebook initially, then when people seemed to like it on there, thought I'd give posting it on reddit a shot. Reddit is one of my favorite websites and a pretty great online community, and until recently I'd just been a lurker (i.e. someone who views and upvotes/downvotes posts without contributing any content or comments of their own), but had recently been looking to change that. I posted it in a popular sub-reddit - /r/videos - and gave it an upvote boost by logging into a couple novelty/secondary accounts I've created, then sat back and estimated it'd probably get around 20-25 total upvotes. Boy was I wrong.

I posted it to /r/videos on Friday afternoon around 4:30pm, and by the end of that evening, I'd made the reddit front page. For those of you who aren't redditors, making front page is kind of a big deal on the site because of what it takes to get there. Your net upvotes (i.e. your total number of upvotes minus the number of downvotes people give you as well), on average, to make front page must be in the hundreds at least, and usually there's a pretty robust comment section accompanying these posts. What I think must have happened next - no actual data on this all-important bit - is that a redditor who thought the video was cute/funny/whatever tweeted the Youtube link to Xeni Jardin of Boing Boing fame. Xeni then posted the link to Boing Boing for their weekly Caturday post, people started viewing, retweeting, posting to their Tumblrs, and more, and everything kind of exploded from there.

I woke up the next morning to find that overnight, the video had become significantly more popular. If Youtube Analytics is to be believed (and I have some reservations about that, but more on that in a later post, probably), by midnight that night, it had gone from maybe a couple thousand views to almost 60,000, and was still climbing fast. I woke up to two rather remarkable emails – one from ABC News requesting permission to post the video on the Good Morning America website and asking for any editorial details I could provide, and one from a viral marketing group called Viral Spiral who were interested in helping me license and manage the video. To the former, I enthusiastically gave permission, and to the latter, I asked for more information out of sheer curiosity. I’ve always been uncomfortable with the thought of making money in this kind of way, so while their array of clients was actually pretty impressive (they currently help manage viral videos like Charlie Bit My Finger and that sneezing panda one), I never really had any intention of enlisting their services.

Over the next couple of days, I’ve watched my view count steadily rocket upwards as more and more sites linked to the video and as more and more people shared it on their FB pages, Twitter feeds, Tumblrs, blogs, or emails to friends. The video made the Yahoo homepage for a while earlier today, as this screenshot that redditor PDXracer messaged to me earlier shows. It has been posted everywhere from Digg to Laughing Squid to Kotaku, and I’ve seen it pop up on quite a few news and radio station websites. As I’m typing this, the latest numbers I have from Youtube are 894,576 views, with over 6,200 “likes” and only a little over 100 “dislikes” from the soulless troll section of Youtube users. My video is the most popular with males aged 25-34, and is most popular in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. It has been watched in countries all over the world, from France to South Africa to Poland to Iceland to Russia, and of the 1,200+ comments on the video on Youtube, a good chunk of them are from people outside of the US. I suspect it’ll reach 1,000,000 views quite soon, if it hasn’t already.

I am so completely fascinated by this whole process it’s hard to even articulate exactly how and why. Everyone has, at some point, seen a viral video – a video that you tell your friends about only to hear “Oh yeah, I saw that the other day. It was hilarious/awesome/scary/(insert adjective here)!” I’ve seen quite a few myself, some when they’ve gone fully viral, and others in the initial stages, but never in a million years would I have believed that a 1:15 video of my cat sitting on my roommate’s head that I posted to one website would have joined the viral video ranks.

I’m not pretending that the video is going to have any kind of lasting impact whatsoever. That’s the nature of most viral videos – they explode in popularity and make people laugh for a short period of time, then something else comes up to supplant them. Sophie perching up on top of Scott’s head might not have any kind of major social impact, or make any kind of statement about society as a whole, but honestly, I’m just really glad that she could make so many thousands of people smile. :)

Creating an Online Presence

One of the things I've been beat over the head with over the last couple of years is the idea that in order to get anywhere you want career-wise in life, anywhere at all, you must create and maintain an online presence for yourself. There's a lot of wisdom in this assertion, and it's something I'm in the process of trying to do for sure. However, coming from a girl who has been halfheartedly trying to fill up the same paper journal since her 18th birthday - to be fair, I'm about 80% of the way there now - the idea of creating and maintaining a niche for yourself online that is creative, innovative, flattering, and professional yet full of your own personality is an almost insurmountable challenge. Even keeping this blog regularly has proved, at least over the last brutal quarter or two, to be more than I can handle.

When I check out the personal websites of people in professional positions I covet, at first glance, it doesn't look like it'd be too difficult at all to set up something similarly streamlined and professional-looking for myself! Minimalist webpage with my name as the URL, buttons to all my other social networking sites readily available (Facebook, Twitter, blog, my as-yet-non-existent Tumblr, the LinkedIn profile I haven't updated in at least a year, etc.), my resume and contact info, a mission statement, quirky About Me section, and what will hopefully eventually be a long list of projects I've worked on and/or contributed to in some significant way. But then, after thinking about it a little more, I realize that creating this online presence is kind of like getting in shape: the initial uphill struggle of setting everything up is a total bitch, while maintaining it comes more easily with a lot of time and practice, neither of which I've given much thought to over the past couple years.

I think part of it stems from the topic I addressed in my last post. I don't really know yet where I'd specifically like to end up. I know without a doubt that my primary goal is to work with people - my greatest joy in a workplace environment comes with bringing diverse people and personalities together and helping their creative gears turn smoothly by anticipating and filling needs. I'm not creative in the way that encourages individual creation of art or music or a product, but I'm a creative interpersonal problem-solver, and I also really enjoy finding people the information they need at any given time. I'd like to work with people who create, and who are passionate about what they do, since I am passionate about working with people like that. Only problem with this? I've never been in a position to do any kind of project management, and thus don't have a sexy Projects or Professional Involvement list to include on my resume.

So why not network, you say! Use the influence you gain via Twitter or other online media to create those kinds of opportunities for yourself! Easier said than done, I reply. At the moment, I am following 266 people on Twitter and have 171 followers myself (@katie_westlake). I've got this blog, which I try and update at least once every month or so, and there's always the myriad of other more subtle social networking methods you can use, like interacting with people over Facebook or Google+. And many of the networking opportunities I've participated in in the past (the lovely #libchat discussion that goes on every Wednesday on Twitter, for example) aren't as open to me as they once were because my focus is shifting further and further away from library work and more into...unknown territory. Much of the networking available to me right now is library-centric, and I feel a bit unsure as to how to proceed when I see questions geared around "In your library...", or when networking or professional development events pop up in my school email that are designed for job searching in the library world.

All that being said, I'm going to try and work a lot harder on developing and maintaining a solid online presence for myself. I'll recruit all the help I need to build an awesome website to showcase my accomplishments, whatever they'll eventually be, and I'll be posting a lot more on this blog, Twitter, and Google+. Might even start up a Tumblr, if it wouldn't be too hipster-y of me. The danger of doing this, of course, is figuring out how much of myself I can include in these things without being seen as unprofessional, but that's for another post. Right now, it's off to check the discussion boards for 580 and do some reading for INFX 543.