How to generate 500,000 views of a video in 4 days. (BBC viral case study)

The Brief

Use a single clip of a surfer, taken from the BBC2 series South Pacific to engage surfing, tech and video lovers online ahead of the series launch.

Photo from mikesten on Flickr

<- ‘Creat

ives’ ->

A clip of this type placed on the BBC Youtube channel would ordinarily receive around 40,000 views without promotion. Could we help smash through this number?

Photo from mikesten on Flickr

<- ‘Creat

ives’ ->

The Planning

The film of the surfer is undeniably awesome, so selling this in to surfer and video communities would be the easier part but what about the influential tech communities?

Proper job

<- that’s s

ooo cool.

But who cares?

The $100,000 dollar camera used was a great way to get tech influencers engaged - modded by the BBC to capture these unique shots. Our online PR angle needed to exploit this key conversation starter and get the tech community chatting.

With our story straight, we set our list of key influencers: Where did we want to see the clip being featured? Who might want to run editorial?

And where did we want the conversations to spread to to ensure organic sharing of the clip?

What were our conversations starters? What did we want influencers to chat about?

Proper job

The Results

The sites we contacted loved it, and their influence helped the clip spread quickly:

Rubber Republic online PR contacts form the top referrers on YouTube.

1 million + viewsto date

Within 4 days the campaign had over 500,000 views, and had generated 240+ blog posts.

The Twitter and social network buzz was particularly impressive, with 500+ Tweets and 3182 Diggs.

6th May - 13th May - Top favourited video across YouTube & top 5 viewed globally

Some other things that were just plain cool.

iPlayerSome sites chose to embed the clip directly from the BBC iPlayer, so these extra views wonʼt count against the Youtube views.

Viral Video ChartOn the launch week, the clip outperformed the new T-mobile Trafalgar Square Karaoke video and fell in behind Susan Boyleʼs first audition clip (one of the largest ever Youtube clips)

DIGGCollege Humour, who specialise in Viral clips and do very well at it, put enormous importance on getting their content to the top of DIGG (they hold a party when they do) They have only managed this 8 times. The Surfer clip did it. Party?

And what did people say?

Comment cloud generated from Youtube comments

Finally, a key indicator of our seeding work can be seen when we compare the performance of the exact same YouTube clip which wasn t̓ seeded by us. Our clip reached over 500,000 views in 4 days, the other clip barely 150 views.

< Seeded by u

s

< NOT seeded by

us

Seed and be seen ; - )