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The Digital Marketing Podcast
How to Go Viral – The Science Behind Content that Spreads
00:26:01
In this episode of The Digital Marketing Podcast, Daniel Rowles is joined by Brendan Kane, viral strategist and author of One Million Followers, for a deep dive into the art and science of making content go viral. Going viral often feels like...
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- [00:00]
Daniel Rolls
Welcome back to the Digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by targetinternet.com My name is Daniel Rolls and in this episode we have a guide to how to go viral. Before you say it, that old thing when your boss says we need this content to go viral, is it really a thing? Well, actually, what we've got here is an interview with Brendan Cain. And Brendan blew me away, having read some of his books and then managing to interview him. He wrote a book, one Million Followers, which is an experiment in how can you go from scratch and get a million followers. And Brendan will talk us through that. But what he's really spoken about in his other books is how can you make virality repeatable? How can you use social media as a business multiplier? Can you do this while staying on brand? And actually, what are the video and content formats that really, really work? And he has the most amazing technique to looking at this. And he made me change my mind on something completely, which is I was really concerned about, you know, people just kind of looking at these different formats of videos that are out there and just doing the same thing that other people are doing. It's not about that at all. But actually what he does is reflect on. So I am here with Brendan Kane. So why don't you just tell us, Brendan, a bit about the book, 1 million followers and the kind of work that went into it as well. Because I was fascinated when the PR company reached out about this and, and I love the book. So, yeah, tell me a bit about it.
- [01:29]
Brendan Cain
Yeah, so I, I kind of stumbled my way into social media. So I initially wanted to be a film producer and went to film school, hopefully learning kind of some aspects of business because I thought, like, to be a producer you need to know the, you know, what business is. But quickly realized they didn't teach you anything about business in film school. So this was like 2002, 2003. So at the time I just started said like, hey, I'm going to start a few businesses, the learn on my own. And the most cost efficient way was to create online companies. So I started to get my foothold in digital and then when I graduated from film school, I moved to LA in 2005 to pursue a career in film as a producer. But I realized I was one of a million people like, you know, you want to, like, the beautiful thing about the film industry is everybody starts at the bottom. So I started at the bottom making coffee copies, deliveries. But when the people I wanted to connect with, the heads of the studios or producers or directors said, well, why did you move here? I would say, I want to be a film producer. And I could see everybody's eyes glaze over. So I had to take a step back and find, well, what was my hook point? Well, how could I stand out? And I just realized in the studio I was working for that every time we finished a film, there'd be a sense of anxiety and stress that would come over the studio because we were investing tens of millions of dollars into a single piece of content and then committing tens of millions of dollars to market that piece of content. And it's very different than any other business. You don't have years or decades to build a brand. You literally have months for hundreds of millions of people around the world to know about this. So I took a step back and I. And social media was first coming on the scene. And, you know, because it was 2005, MySpace was the predominant player. They had 25 million users. Facebook had just launched the year before, it only had 6 million. And YouTube was, in its first year, had 8 million users. So I just thought, like, well, these new things are emerging, these new platforms, and there's no such thing as an influencer. But I saw that, you know, there was these people creating content from their bedrooms or their webcams, reaching millions of people. So I just went to the head of the studio and said, hey, I want to reach out to these people on YouTube and connect them with our movie stars and movies to interact and create promotional content. Which we became the first ever influencer campaign on YouTube, which was wildly successful for a movie called Crank with Jason Statham. And it was like a smaller movie, didn't have a huge budget, but it ended up being very profitable because we tapped into these resources. So that's how I first got into social media. And then I kind of kept evolving from there. I built the first ever influencer technology platform on top of MySpace and licensed it to MTV, and then did other partnerships with MTV, which opened the doors to work with celebrities like Taylor Swift and Rihanna on kind of their social media commerce strategies. And then got into journalism, worked with Katie Couric with a little bit, got into paid media. But basically how I came with the idea with the book is I was doing all of this behind the scenes of working with Fortune 500 companies and celebrities. And when I would talk to people, they're like, oh, yeah, it's because you're working with MTV or Vice magazine or Ikea. That's the reason it's working. And I knew because I'VE tested so much and saw so much data that it could be applied to anyone. And that's where I came up with the idea for creating the book 1 million followers to kind of prove that out that like this kind of these strategies and social media was accessible to everyone, not just mainstream corporations and people with large budgets or teams or fancy titles.
- [04:56]
Daniel Rolls
Fantastic. So talk us through that key premise of the book as well for people that don't anything about it, because I think it's a great premise and it's a brave premise as well to work at and to kind of prove that point.
- [05:04]
Brendan Cain
Yeah. So the premise was running an experiment on myself because I wasn't a celebrity. Yes, I worked in the movie industry, but I was behind the camera. I didn't have an audience, I didn't have a following. I probably knew professionally 20 or 30 people at the time. So it wasn't like I was communicating with a ton of people or had this big audience. But the premise was building an audience of a million people in a hundred countries in less than 30 days, leveraging the systems that I developed. Now, it wasn't about making me famous, it wasn't about turning me into an influencer. It was purely an experiment. And a part of that experiment was testing different types of content around myself to understand what will cause people to share my content at high velocity and then opt in to follow my at. The first experiment I did was on Facebook.
- [05:51]
Daniel Rolls
So one of the things I've noticed as well, I mean, we'll come to this later on, is the fact that you kind of tied together the social media, but also the email side of things, because I've signed up for your newsletters and that they're phenomenally well tied in with all this as well. So I kind of. The point I want to get to is you feel that virality is repeatable and you've proven that point time and time again. You go to the website, which we'll talk about in a moment as well. So is it repeatable? Because most marketers, they would say, no, no, you can't. When your boss says, I'll make this go viral, they kind of fill with dread. But you've kind of proven that. So do you want to talk us through that?
- [06:22]
Brendan Cain
Yeah, so about eight years ago. So I've been in the space since 2005, so I've been learning like trial and error through social media. And obviously social media has evolved dramatically since 2005. And one of the biggest factors in the difference between what it was when I first Started versus where it is today is purely the number of people. You know, when I first started, there's less than 50 million people using social media. Today there's over 5 billion people using it. So it's just the sheer amount of content. So obviously I've learned and tested and tried things that have worked haven't worked. But about eight years ago, we started to kind of create our creative model from scratch. And the core kind of like real and we can dive as deep as you want into the creative model. But one of the core elements to the creative model is qualitative analysis. So what does that actually mean? Well, let's talk about the difference between quantitative and qualitative. So quantitative is just the pure numbers. It's how many views, how many click throughs, how many, how, what reach, you know, the retention graph, things of that nature. It's the hard numbers. Now those are important things to have, but where they're limited. It doesn't explain the why. It does a good job of telling you something worked or didn't work, but not the fundamental why behind it. So that's where qualitative analysis comes in. And that's kind of the contributing storytelling elements and tools that you use to drive performance. So again, I started going to, in college, going to film school. So if you think about, and I'm sure people have seen it in movies or heard of friends or stories like, what do you do when you go to film school? Well, you sit down and watch classic movies, you break them down. Even though I wanted to be a producer, they made me take acting classes, they made me take editing classes, they made me direct things, light sets, be a cinematographer. Why? Because all of these small nuances contribute to whether you create a successful movie or not. So the people listening to this, I'm sure you've probably sat down, you were super excited to see a movie and you left. You're like, you know, it just. Something was missing. I don't know what it was, but it wasn't as good as I thought. Well, that was because one of those qualitative elements were off. Maybe the director just didn't deliver, he was going through a divorce. Or maybe the actors had bad chemistry or the dialogue was bad. Now the reality is social media is the same. People kind of think social media is like this new mystic kind of medium, that it's a mystery black box. But the reality is it's just another storytelling platform. And the people that succeed and win are the best storytellers. So that's why in our model we focus so heavily on the qualitative elements of what really makes up a good story, how to tell a good story. So We've spent over 10,000 hours researching what we call storytelling formats and structures and understanding deeply what makes them successful. So we've analyzed over 300 of these formats. And I say that because there's a lot of them out there. And I'll give you some prime examples. One that pretty much everybody has seen is called man on the Street. And it's you approach a random stranger on the street and you engage and interact with them. Now. Now, the beauty of formats is they can be leveraged for any industry or sector. So man on the street, it's used by photographers like I know a friend, Alex Stemp, that's amassing audience of 20 million people, re approaches random strangers on the street, offers them a professional photo shoot. There's an account the school of hard knocks that ask people, well, how did you make your first million dollars? There's a guy body by Mark that asks, you know, fit people, how did you, you know, what's your workout? Caleb Simpson, you know, ask people for home tours. So these formats are very flexible. Now, the interesting thing about man on the street and this kind of where I know that social media is, is is not some mystery black box. That man on the street format generates billions and billions of views and tens of millions of followers. You know, when it was invented in 1954 for the first season of the Tonight Show. So it shows you like this storytelling format was invented in 1954, but it still works today. Another format is called two characters, one light bulb, where it's the same person that plays two different characters and they debunk a common myth or misconception about an industry. So Erica Kohlberg uses this about the fine print of legal contracts, like what happens when your flight gets canceled, what happens your AirPods get break. Mark Tilbury uses it for breaking down elements of buying a car or insurance or things of that nature. That one, the first time I saw it was in Austin Powers in 1997 when he played Dr. Evil and Austin Powers going back and forth. So we look at these formats and what we do is we cross analyze and study. What's the difference between when people use that format to generate tens of millions of views versus when people use that exact same format and generate tens of thousands of views. And that's where kind of the science kind of comes into play and you can really understand how and why things go viral. But just as important, how and why Things don't go viral.
- [11:31]
Daniel Rolls
Well, what I was fascinated by as well, when I was reading the book was that I kind of suddenly clicked in when you talked about the format. And it's like, okay, I can get it now. Because you've got these, these formats that have worked for years. There's lots of new ones out there as well. But actually work out what's going to be the best one for this particular brand to deliver what it needs to deliver, that's going to generate what they want. But then that, that piece of actually saying, this is why it works, this is why it doesn't work, and this is why it is. And I think that was. That was the key thing to me that really kind of really resonated. So let's move on to that a little bit. It's how can you do this while staying on brand and actually generating the desired outcomes you want? So, yes, we can, we can get great reach, we can go off there, we can get loads of views because entertainment and it's, you know, it's engaging and all those kind of things. But how do you do it within that framework of the business, an organization or a brand?
- [12:18]
Brendan Cain
Yeah. So number one is we never work with clients or tell somebody to do something for the sake of going viral. It has to translate into business outcomes. So we're not going to tell you to do a silly TikTok dance video or follow some silly trend just because it can generate millions of views. It has to tie to your specific expertise. It's also the reason that we have a team of researchers. We've spent the 10,000 hours, identified 300 formats. By the end of the year, we'll be at 500. Because our kind of, you know, core philosophy is how do we match a client, a brand, an individual to their ideal format? Because there's two things that I consider at a macro level when helping people find their format. Number one, what is the resources that they have available to them? Because I don't try and extend people beyond their resources. Like, there are formats literally that you can use an iPhone and go viral. Like, we have a hand doctor that started with zero followers, zero views, and is at 800,000 followers and got a book deal and a TV deal out of it. But number two, what excites you? Like, what is a format that you just absolutely love, that you look at it and be like, you know, this is the perfect vehicle for me to share my zone of genius, my expertise that's related to my subject matter. So that's kind of the first component. The second one is you have to kind of reframe the difference between, like, organic social media and building an audience and, like, paid media. So paid media is direct response. You're just trying to just drive a transaction. Organic social media is trying to build an audience, and building an audience is getting people to know, like, and trust you to the point that they automatically want to buy from you. And that's a big kind of mindset shift that a lot of people need to know is, like, I run into so many brands and even individuals that are struggling because what they do is they treat their social media profile like their website and their organic posts like their ads, and that's just not the case. Like, I ask everybody listening to this, when was the last time you. You logged on to social media? And be like, I want to see a great ad today. No, that's not why we do it. But again, I understand we are in the business of driving business outcomes. We want to drive success. So what we purely see is how can we find a format that really connects with the expertise, their zone of genius, that will ultimately inspire people to build that relationship where they want to take that next level. So I'll just give you a prime example. We had a leather craftsman come to us. Tanner Leatherstein, you know, a really fascinating guy. At age 11, he created his first leather jacket. He just fell in love with creating that. So he created a leather goods company, you know, when he grew up. And, you know, he approached social media like most people was, hey, my social media profile is my website, and I'm just going to create ads. And it just wasn't breaking through. So we helped him develop a format called Is it worth It? Where basically, you know, he. He takes like a $5,000 Chanel handbag. And yes, he actually buys these handbags for the price, deconstructs it on screen, and shows you whether it's worth the money you're paying for it. So that single format took him from 2,000 followers to 2.5 million across social media channels, and he has 94 videos, over a million views. Now, people may ask, well, why, if he's taking other people's handbags, how does that translate into business for him? Well, what he's doing is he's building trust. He's building relationship with the audience, and. And the audience size is so scalable. People have built that relationship. They automatically want to take that next step. They want to click on the link in his bio, visit his website, see what are the products or services that he Sells. I mean, he even told me when we were having dinner a few weeks ago, like, he has to be careful about when he launches videos because his products will sell out because it just creates that much demand. So it's a bit of a kind of mindset shift. Um, but if you choose a format that's authentic to you, it demonstrates your core expertise, your zone of genius, it will automatically lead to people wanting to buy from you. But it is a little bit different of like, of what people typically look at, of terms of like just trying to sell the product. Do product shots feature the product in every kind of video type scenario?
- [16:31]
Daniel Rolls
Yeah, I think that mindset change we talked about in the podcast a fair bit before because in a way we're in a good zone at the moment because the fact is that measurement's getting harder. And actually I think that's made things a little bit better because when we were going through direct response, you got this many clicks, this many conversions, that was where the money was getting spent. And actually we know the only reason you probably clicked on that brand in the first place is you trusted them because you've been listening to the podcast for six months beforehand. So actually I think now people are maybe taking that step back and saying, look, that relationship building, that brand building is so much more at heart of this. And that's why the book to me will just really blew me away, I think. Oh, right, I get it. It is trying to persuade people that mindset change. So I really think people should get and read it. One of the things that there was an interesting point that I thought was fairly against best practice in my mind, first of all, is like, why mastering viral formats on TikTok trumps originality. And I was really interested in that because it's not being original is the best thing you can possibly do. But yeah, to talk us through that.
- [17:23]
Brendan Cain
Yeah. So the best, the best way I can give an analogy, to break it down. So again, I started my, my career in the film industry and one of the things that I learned from that is movies are very formulaic. So if you think about any movie over the past hundred years that you've watched, almost everyone follows the same format and it's a three act structure. So if you think because a lot of people, like you said, have this concern of like, well, formats sound great, but they're going to restrict my creativity. But in reality they unlock creativity. So we think one of the best storytellers of our generation, Steven Spielberg, you know, you have Jaws versus E.T. jurassic park versus Indiana Jones Lincoln versus Saving Private Ryan. Like they're all distinct, different stories but they're, they feel unique, they feel original, but they're all using the same structure. But when we sit down and watch any movie, we're not sitting down and be like, ah, Steven, I got you. You're using the three act structure again, like this is going to be boring. No, that structure, what it does for a filmmaker like a Steven Spielberg, it gives you a container that is proven to work, that allows you to then master all the nuances within that container, within that format structure. And the same thing applies with social media is when we have the guardrails of a structure, it allows us to master the nuances within that structure so that we can become a genius storyteller. Another analogy to think about because a lot of people think I need to be original with each post. I need to, I need to chase trends, I need to do the latest thing. So if we were to sit down and say, you know what we want, we're going to learn a musical instrument. We're going to become a masterful master of a musical instrument. And there's two tracks that we can take is like the, the original trend route or the format route. Well, the original trend route would look something like this. Week one, we, we start with the piano. Week two, we switch to the drums. Week three, we switch to the, the flute. Then week four we go to the violin, we keep switching the goal post. Well, are we going to be good at any of these versus if we choo chose the format rounds to say, you know what, we're going to spend the next year mastering the piano, like that's where it comes through. And that's where you see the most successful people on social media, when they're successful because of social media is they sit down, they find their format and they master the nuances of how to tell the story within it. Now again, formats unlock creativity. You can still put your zone of genius in there and be able to share the information that you want to.
- [19:55]
Daniel Rolls
Yeah, I love it. I mean it's really changed my mindset about the whole thing because there've been this big pushback against kind of trend jacking, just jumping on the latest trend. But actually when I kind of thought about it, I thought, well actually you could say is if this thing's working for everyone, there's also the argument of like, if I double down on that and that's just a format that I'm using, then actually that that can work. So that's maybe why some People are getting some leverage off the back of it. So I think it's really made me reanalyze things a little bit as well.
- [20:20]
Brendan Cain
Yeah, because again, trend jacking is like you're, you're, you're jumping from thing to thing to thing, and you're not mastering the fundamentals of telling a story. You look at, again, like, we all watch sitcoms, like TV sitcoms like Friends or Seinfeld or any of those, you know, the most popular shows. They're all formulaic, yet we still love them because they've, you know, Friends in Seinfeld feel very different, yet they're using the exact same structure in terms of how they're delivering their stories.
- [20:48]
Daniel Rolls
So is there any other common kind of social media growth myths that we think we should try and debunk as well at this stage?
- [20:54]
Brendan Cain
Yeah, I would say frequency is the key to success, is just a volume play. I think that that doesn't do a disservice to people as they're trying to. Either they're trying to start out or they're trying to find the clues to what, what succeeds. Because this is not about how much content we can produce. It's more about how we can master the art of storytelling algorithms. And more importantly, people don't favor volume, they favor quality. So if you think about going into Netflix, like, how do you choose the next TV show that you want to binge watch? Is it the number of episodes, the length of the episodes, or is it the trailer and a friend recommendation? I don't know about you, but it's always like either the trailer or the friend recommendation that drives it. And it's the same thing. Like, because we live in a world with social media with 5 billion people, there's over a billion pieces of content uploaded across every social media platform every day. And then you just think about the amount of content we consume from like a streaming service providers. We are professional content consumers. We have so much choice at our disposal. We are going to favor and consume content based upon how the story impacts us, the quality of story, how it connects with us, not because a creator produces a certain amount of content. Now, I will say 10 years ago, 15 years ago, these platforms did favor frequency because social media was a lot simpler back then. You know, if you think about 15 years ago, you know, you get somebody to follow you, you post, there's a good chance that they're going to see it. Today, there's, there's no free wins. Just because you have followers, it doesn't mean people are Going to see your content. So that's a big one that I think does a disservice to a lot of people. It burns people out. Now there is a play like frequency can play a role once you've kind of mastered your format, if you want to increase it from there. But when you're starting out, you kind of want to master these nuances. So that's definitely a myth. Another big one is that you need like a big team, you need fancy equipment, you know, you need lighting and all of these things. When in reality, if you have a phone, an iPhone, and it can capture decent quality and you can tell a compelling story, you can break through. Now, there are certain formats that escalate the amount of production, but it's not. You don't need it to kind of drive that initial traction. Another big one is my industry is not sexy or interesting enough to go viral. Every. We've worked in every industry. Sector taxes go viral, insurance goes viral, real estate goes viral, nutrition goes viral. Any subject matter can. It's just the context of how you. How you tell the express the information to the audiences you're trying to reach.
- [23:35]
Daniel Rolls
Yeah, that was one of my big learnings, actually. Looking at your website is looking at all those case studies and examples and going. It is every kind of sector that's.
- [23:42]
Brendan Cain
Way bigger go viral.
- [23:43]
Daniel Rolls
Right. I guess there's always an angle. Right, so. So tell us about that. So tell us about Hook Point. Tell us about the business, how people can follow you, how they can get in touch and what your business offers as a service. Because I read the book, it's changed my mindset. You've read other books that I haven't read yet and I've started getting your emails and I love all of your stuff. So tell us all about it.
- [24:01]
Brendan Cain
Yeah, so essentially what our company does is we help brands, individuals find their ideal format and we do the research for them. So we basically, for us to break down a format takes us between 15 to 20 hours. It's like that lengthy of a. Of a process. But what we do is we help you match with your ideal format and then we break down kind of the blueprint of how to execute on it. Like those qualitative nuances that allow you to. Not we. Again, we're not one of these people say, oh, this is working, so go do that. It's like, this is working and we spend 15 to 20 hours breaking down how and why it works, but more importantly, when it doesn't work, why it doesn't work. So we really help clients with this matching process of finding their format and then we train them in our creative model that we've developed over the past eight years as well.
- [24:53]
Daniel Rolls
Yeah, I love it. It's such a structured approach to things that actually I can really see, having read the book, how that would work in practice as well. So what about people? Where can they follow you? What's the best way to get in contact?
- [25:02]
Brendan Cain
They can go to hookpoint.com to learn more about it. They can. You know, I just released my third book, the Guide to Going Viral. If they want to just dive more into that process, they can go to hookpoint.com forward/dmp for digital marketing podcast and they can just follow me on Instagram. I respond to DMs on Instagram, LinkedIn. I produce content on YouTube. So we're pretty much everywhere.
- [25:24]
Daniel Rolls
Brilliant. All right, well, all of that will be in the show notes, so targetinternet.com forward/podcast. We'll put all of the links in there to get in contact. Brendan, what I've read of your stuff so far has been a bit of a complete mindset change for me. And it kind of. We were arguing things about four podcasts ago that I've now changed my mind on completely. So thank you so much for the insights. Thank you for joining us. I know how busy you are and hopefully we'll see you again on the digital marketing podcast.
- [25:43]
Brendan Cain
Yeah, thanks for having me. It was a pleasure to connect with you and everybody that tuned into this.
- [25:48]
Daniel Rolls
For more episodes resources to leave a review or to get in contact, go to targetinternet.com forward/podcast.