Sometimes we AB test and the results aren’t big enough to call a win for either one and we go with our best judgement. But when there’s a significant difference in clicks, we’ll take the math over our own judgement. Anyone who claims they can call a headline every time is like the SEO guy or the marketer who says they can make anything go viral. We never assume we know what will win, because we’re almost always wrong. That’s why we seem to be doing well, because we learn from our wrongness and improve upon it each time. 

That’s also why the title of the presentation includes the words “just kidding” and “good luck with that.” And why the final page says “No we can’t make that thing go viral.” There is no secret recipe, just testing things until they do slightly better than last time.If you aren’t testing, you are leaving chips on the table. Math doesn’t lie.

also, i tend to believe that any longer, once something becomes the latest “thing,” it’s time to find the “new,” thing (i.e. “viral,” anything, “xtreme,” in any product name, the changing google “doodle,” and any of the douchy descriptors used in job postings (ninja this, rock-star that, guru whatever…))

if you’re leading rather than following, you’re doing your own “thing…”

“SEO Expert”

You don’t think there’s such a thing as a search engine optimization expert?  Strange.

What should the most experienced, educated and highest performing Google optimization consultants call themselves that would better suit your sensibilities?

I usually think the opposite. For the most part, it’s engineered, and only rarely does it not have a corporation behind it these days. I can avoid commercials on television, but the only way I can avoid commercials in my social networking feed is to disable all of them.

Your analysis is ungrounded in reality. I accidentally click on obtrusive ads, but that doesn’t mean I find them “wonderful”.

Once everyone is able to frame things in a compelling way and focus their site on optimizing on that, we’ll be irrelevant. Until then, we’re here to make sure those good ideas and videos get seen by a lot more eyes. 
We’ve helped people prevent their houses from being forclosed on, helped women’s organizations push their messages about the horrible ways the media perpetuates horrible ideas about body image, helped a toy company get girls more interested in engineering, etc… We’re not here to steal other people’s stuff, we’re here to help elevate it and get their entire org more attention that it deserves. Look at slide 25. The exact same piece of content, two different headlines. 1 version was seen by 8000 people, the other version has now been seen by 800,000. The original artist, depending on their location still gets traffic, and if you look at their youtube stats we can bump them exponentially. That’s their traffic, not ours.

So framing the content is just as important as the content itself. And if we can help get those ideas out there, we’re gonna sleep fine at night. 

Seriously, why do people share this stuff?  Why not click through to the original source of the cool video/story/project/whatever and share THAT?

Here is what most people miss when they think of virality — whatever you’re promoting *MUST* be both high-valence AND worthwhile.  If it’s not highly useful, it must be highly entertaining. The discussion around it must also be highly useful or highly entertaining.

All media tends to favor extremes, and the internet favors novelty, hope, outrage, and cats. Never forget the cats.