PR Squared: More Viral Video Lessons: An Interview with the My-Box-In-A-Box Geniuses

If you are hooked in to the YouTube generation, then you are no doubt familiar with the "My Box In A Box" video, an hysterical response to the just-as-hysterical (and hysterically profane) SNL send-up of boy band music videos. "My Box In A Box" was wildly successful by "viral standards" --- as you can see here, this parody has been viewed 3.7M times!

I had the opportunity to interview Ben Relles, an Agency.com exec who independently masterminded this effort, alongside a collection of friends, colleagues and strangers. Below you can learn even more lessons about how to create and "market" a viral video campaign. (Note that some of Ben's revelations may contradict the lessons shared yesterday --- which just goes to show that in this Brave New World, there are no "right" answers.)

PR-Squared: What was the tipping point – when did you know that you had a monster hit on your hands?

Ben Relles: The first day Break.com posted the clip it was viewed on that site over 800,000 times. So in terms of volume, that was the biggest day. Then the 2.5 million views on YouTube came more gradually over the past few weeks – powered mostly by blogs and people posting the video on their MySpace pages.

I don’t know if we’d call this video a “monster hit”-- but we definitely were most excited once mainstream media started covering it. Z100 in New York was the first radio station to play the song, and then dozens of stations started playing it after that. It was even the most requested song in several markets. Then MSNBC called the video the “Most Viralist Video” and made it the #1 story on their Countdown with Keith Olbermann. And now print publications have started covering it including Rolling Stone and Cosmopolitan.

To me that’s why YouTube is such an interesting story right now. Artists of all types will continue to use YouTube as a vehicle to bigger things. We’ve had something like 2 million hits on YouTube, but so have hundreds of other videos. What made this successful was what happened after the video became popular. Leah Kauffman -- who performed the song -- is talking to record labels. One station has started playing some of her earlier music. Melissa (the lip-synching star of the video, a.k.a. "Bunny") is getting offers to be on TV. Someone bought the "box" on Ebay for $1500 and we were able to give that money to charity. All of that follow-on activity has been interesting to follow.

As I’m sure you know, the extraordinary part of social media like YouTube, MySpace and blogs is that the tipping point principles are still valid – but the speed at which an idea spreads is remarkably compressed. In the Tipping Point the “connectors” were the Tippy kids in the East Village or the popular guy who knows 126 people. Now the connectors are the bloggers who have 1000s and sometimes millions of readers who trust them to determine what’s worth watching.

Every time an influential blog picked up the Box story we had a huge spike in traffic. Perez Hilton, the Huffington Post, CollegeHumor – those sites are the reason this video reached critical mass. They epitomize the “Law of the Few” discussed in The Tipping Point.

PR-Squared: How much did it cost to make the video? How hard was it to produce? Could “Joe Vidcam” (cool younger brother to Joe Sixpack?!) have done a lot of this work on his own?

Ben Relles: The video cost about $500 to shoot and edit. So yes “Joe Vidcam” could clearly have produced the video. On the other hand, we were fortunate to have some very talented people in front of and behind the camera who essentially donated their time. Leah and Rick (producer) recorded the song in about 4 hours and I feel like it’s as good as anything on the radio.

And when you look at the big viral stories of last year – the Mentos guys, LonelyGirl15, the guy who takes pictures of his face everyday – those videos were all driven by ingenuity, not big budgets.

PR-Squared: How much of your life did it swallow up, pacing and reacting to the interest?

Ben Relles: I’d like to take credit for the video spreading, but really most of it happened on its own. I was working full time while this was being produced, so we had to do the whole thing in a weekend.

Once the video was produced, we just followed up by making it open to people. We made it available on YouTube, put up a MySpace page and a blog and then offered the Box song for free. And then it was other people who created a lot of the content that kept Bunny going – someone made a T-Shirt, there was a fan club, someone created a Facebook group that now has 500 members. We had dozens of unsolicited suggestions for follow up songs and lyrics. And then the funniest thing I saw was a 30 foot “Box in a Box” sign at a Penn – St Joe’s basketball game.

Another thing we did was make it clear that if someone mentioned us, we’d mention them on our blog. Also I think the persona we all gave Bunny gave the idea some stickiness. Most people who wrote asked wanted to know when the next video was coming out, and we wanted to let them know something would be in the works.

PR Squared: How do you feel about the fact that this hit depended on spoofing “mainstream” content (SNL) – clearly BoxInABox was as clever as anything seen on TV, but, do you feel as if it would have been as well-received if it hadn’t been a spoof?

Ben Relles: It might have been as well-received, but it wouldn’t have reached nearly as many people or been as popular.

I thought the SNL sketch was hilarious. And we knew if our video became popular it would be because it was an extension of the SNL conversation already taking place. “You see that SNL video?” … “Yeah…did you see there’s a female version now?”… “Really? Where?”

Online social media just offer an extension of conversations that happened 10 years ago at water coolers and dinner tables. This dialogue now happens over IM, on MySpace pages, in discussion groups and in the comments sections. Places where people can see the response immediately and participate. There’s this virtual water cooler with millions of people talking, and where the conversation echoes much farther and longer.

Most of the blogs that posted our video had posted something about the SNL video a couple weeks earlier. So yes – we definitely have to thank Justin Timberlake and Andy Samberg.

PR-Squared: Do you feel more pressure to do something even more original in your follow-up?

Ben Relles: I don’t think Melissa and Leah will put out another video unless they feel that it’s something original and funny. Probably no more boxes. Probably not another spoof.

But I think the character of Bunny has legs. There are so many Britney’s and Christina’s, and Beyonces out there. And they all sing about basically the same 4 or 5 things. I’d love to see Bunny be a character who sings about bizarre subjects that don’t usually make it on the radio. Leah had previous experience writing and performing humorous songs before I approached her about this so she’s brought some great ideas to the table. And the second video we did was Melissa’s idea and I think it turned out really funny.

PR-Squared: What lessons might be applicable to Joe Vidcam, the aspiring YouTube star who wants to follow in Bunny’s footsteps?

Ben Relles: I would continue to encourage easy participation. That may be somewhat of a cliché, but wherever the video is posted – YouTube, blogs, forums – there’s always a conversation and debate taking place right underneath it. Digital is such an active medium. Instead of people passively receiving messages, they can view something and immediately engage in a dialogue about it.

Along those lines, we intentionally made the song free and let people remix it, share it, create ring tones out of it and whatever else they wanted to do. Obviously record labels are grappling with how to handle this, but for us we got a lot of feedback that people loved the song so we just wanted to make it as easy to download as possible.

When someone requested to make a T-Shirt we put it on our website. Once people were intrigued we wanted there to be a trail for them to follow and participate in. Clearly the internet is redefining how people collaborate on an idea and part of the success of this has been people getting involved.

Second – it helps if the content is easy to embed and share. Once our video was on YouTube, within hours we saw it on people blogs and personal pages. Unlike a microsite, a video can live anywhere. Getting someone away from what they’re doing to go spend time on a different webpage is a real challenge. A friend of mine and I created a site last March called www.yourperfectgirl.com . I thought it was funny. But I think because it relied on people forwarding a link to a friend it never made it past a few hundred thousand visitors.

Finally - I’d tell people that there are no hard and fast “rules” to this. You’ll see a lot of marketing ‘experts’ out there naming the “rules” to viral. I think you can safely ignore them. For example – viral videos don’t necessarily have to be authentic. They don’t have to be entertaining. They don’t have to increase someone’s importance when sent. The videos that break through are often successful because they are UNLIKE anything that’s been done. I’ll avoid ‘think outside the box’ references, but you look at the videos people have responded to and they often are completely unique to anything else out there.

Another common alleged “rule” to viral is that people ‘have’ to send it to each other. I think that’s a big misconception. For instance, about one million people have been to our blog. We determine where they come from and very rarely is it through an email. It’s through MySpace postings and blog postings. And content aggregators. And search engines. The nature of viral has changed in that videos go viral when they are posted about.

So my final advice would be don’t listen to people like me listing rules to viral – if you have an idea you’re confident in, go ahead and put it out there.

PR-Squared: What makes a video viral, in your opinion?

Ben Relles: For some reason people like debating what the word viral means. To me if something is shared online or offline – then the term viral is fine.

Since I work at a digital agency there are much bigger implications than just trying to have a video go viral. We need to determine who our audience is, how we want them to react, how we’ll measure the impact of viral content and so on.

That said, as an agency our goal is to have our clients’ brands provide the actual content. We don’t want to just be pre-roll commercials before the content. We want to provide a value exchange. Whether it’s a video, or a widget or an email. We want people to feel that they were provided with something they wanted – something valuable, or funny or informative. We’re not interested in subjecting people to one-way communications they are looking to avoid.

The Box thing was fun and a great learning experience. But we are still trying to understand what we did right and what part was luck. And from a marketing standpoint, it’s definitely an ongoing challenge understanding how we can harness the power of viral to helping clients promote their brands and their products or services.

And “viral” is in the eyes of the beholder so to speak. Fundamentally a video is viral if it’s shared. For most people what makes a video successful is if it reaches a few thousand other people. What determines if a viral campaign is successful for brands is a lot more complicated. But social media and collaboration are changing the way people are entertained and brands need to create content and tools worth sharing. Any way you look at it, this is genuinely exciting new territory.

Tags: my+box+in+a+box, youtube, viral+video, ben+relles, agency.com, pr+2.0, public+relations, marketing