This outstanding animated montage by Dan Meth and Micah Frank honors the pantheon of online pseudo-celebrities and viral vid characters. It was a little sobering to watch; so many clips with which I felt a personal connection obviously have the same widespread appeal as an episode of Grey’s Anatomy.

I felt a bit betrayed. Now I know how Weezer fans feel.

Now treat yourself to some Sly and the Family to get the annoying song out of your head (you’ll thank me).

A blog post from makeuseof.com ran up digg yesterday and got me wondering about all the lists we create. You see them posted all the time: ”My list of favorite X.” This one is pretty typical: 40 Unusual Websites You Should Bookmark.

What compels someone to construct a list like that? Considering the many companies and services mentioned, I’m hopeful makeuseof.com has not become a PR shill. So why? And why would those 40 make this list? Call it coincidence, but Seth Godin wrote a short post yesterday that hits on the topic. Is makeuseof.com an Official Influencer? Were they targeted by marketers? Likely not. With the barrage of Web applications that seem to pour onto the Internet every day, one magical thing still makes them boom or not…and it’s called “do I give a crap about what it does?” As Seth wrote:

…the most effective technique [for viral campaigns] is making stuff worth talking about in the first place. True viral marketing happens not when the marketer plans for it or targets bloggers or skateboarders or pirates with goatees, but when the item/service/event is worth talking about.

Customers, users, visitors, chumps. Call us what you will, but it’s we humans that matter, not what the application does. Make a product worth using, worth talking about, and you just may be on to something. You can try all day to make it viral, to be on as many lists as you can worm your way onto, but if Your Thing does nothing I need, ciao, baby.

It looks like the major networks have bought in to the web video phenomenon, at least until the next ratings book comes out. Witness the new ABC show i-CAUGHT, which I did in fact catch the other night. The concept is to highlight what is most popular on the web. We’ll see how long it takes for the network to make money from these clip-sharing folks (or maybe they already are).

I’m interested to see if this marriage between Internet video and broadcast TV will last. It looks like it has potential. One of the more interesting viral segments asks people to submit videos for inclusion in the show. The concept is to put in three words how your week has gone. The first round got my attention.

I enjoyed this idea so much I had to submit my own. Here’s hoping I make the cut next week!

While this sounds like a cheap rip-off of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, it is in fact a case study of the power of an idea when coupled with the new Internet. I am not going to recap, but let the clever perpetrator, Oli Young, explain the premise here. And if you are really cool, the Facebook group is here.

While his explanation is entertaining, Young notes some valuable lessons learned. He believes the underlying truth is that viral marketing is hit or miss, yet his later discussion highlights just how you hit. Here is what I make of it.

#1 Don’t try too hard – People don’t react well to any presentation that is too smooth, too aggressive, or too good to be true.

#2 Do consider content – Here, try hard. As Young notes, content is still king. Complex concepts and elaborate themes based on good ideas will garner attention regardless. Again, this goes against aggressive marketing in lieu of better production.

#3 Don’t expect immediate results – Just like its biological counterparts, viral marketing progresses geometrically. That means the size reached tends to double regularly. On the bottom end, 10 to 40 viewers in 3 weeks may not seem like much, but if it is steady, that equals 20,480 in 3 months. (However, let’s not forget to be realistic about 41,943,040 in 6 months, however…just showing the general principle here.)

#4 Do expect a community to form – People rally around ideas…even bad ones, but especially good ones. They become engaged in them. This should always be kept in mind with dealing with participants.

#5 Don’t rely on traditional media to explain it – So far the Fourth Estate doesn’t quite understand the fluidity and malleability of the new Internet. They still accept too much at face value. Young only had a few journalists talk to him, let alone ask him if it was a scam. Instead, most of them just accepted it at face value. Most users did not. So it really makes a good argument for individual judgment.

Overall, it is a very insightful, successful, and juvenile experiment in the wonders of Web 2.0. The only negative I see is that there isn’t some lucky lad out there named SpiderPig Sparkhall Young.

More and more people have been asking us about podcasts, both audio and video. Seems like an increasingly popular way to disseminate content (and it could be an excuse to hit your boss up for an iPod). The catch is that you’re handing absolute playback control over to the audience. No schedule required. Worth the risk?

The folks at Radical Trust think so—and we have to agree.

Podcasting continues to make its ascent out of obscurity with greater production values and a wider variety of content, making the medium as diverse and relevant as any other. The greatest advantage that podcasting has over radio, TV, and even PVRs, is that material can be consumed at any time, any place and as many times as desired.

Here’s their summary of its advantages:

Infinite remixability, maximum viral capability and the ability to respond in other channels makes this an extraordinary medium in my books. This liberation of ‘control’ reaches deep into the heart of radical trust, making it a radical do.

For the record, we’d be lying if we said we didn’t know from podcasting, and we throw our allegiance behind the value of well-produced original content and commentary. If you have a precise message for a specific audience that would appreciate processing content at its convenience, you could do worse. Radical indeed.

One of the best lessons I learned during my bartending days (besides a martini-shaking technique that makes them cold enough to skate on) came courtesy of an industry-savvy pub owner. “If someone has a good time here,” he told me, “they’ll tell a friend. If someone has a bad time here, they’ll tell ten friends.”

Such is the driving mentality behind word-of-mouth marketing. If people have a positive experience, they’re bound to share it. If they have a negative experience, they absolutely will. Human nature.

The funny thing is that you, as an organization, have no control over the feedback. You can only control the product or service you provide. And if you try too hard to sell yourself, you’ll get picked apart if you don’t deliver. Examples of this pepper the web. In their earliest incarnations, company websites were little more than over-amped billboards or Yellow Page listings. People threw up all kinds of affirmations – “We’re the best, just ask us!” – and maybe that flew for a minute, just because we were mesmerized by the fact that you were online.

Jump ahead a decade. Now, visitors have become users. They’re looking for a fulfilling experience as much as for information, and they’re the ones who are going to decide if it’s good or not. Oh, and once they’ve made their decision, they have a near-infinite means of sharing their p.o.v. That’s the muscle behind web-driven word-of-mouth marketing.

This is scaring the hell out of many traditionally minded organizations, and their messaging is suffering as a result. They’re afraid to say anything significant online. You can almost hear the company leaders deciding: “Well, if we reveal who we really are, we’re making ourselves too vulnerable to that devastating negative word-of-mouth. We might as well just keep quiet.”

Bad play, because here’s the news – people are going to find out whether you want them to or not. They’re experiencing your products and services – and those of your competitors – and they’re talking about it in blogs, forums, newsgroups and the like. Play your cards too close to the vest, and you’re just making it difficult for your audience to get the info it now thinks it’s entitled to.

It’s “not damned if you do/damned if you don’t.” More like “maybe damned if you do/definitely damned if you don’t.”

So, figure out what messages you want to push, back them up with credible performance, and your intended audience is bound to appreciate and echo it. Get clandestine and quiet, however, and you can bet that they’ll still find a way to dig out the truth. What’s more, they’ll resent you for making it so much trouble. Then they’ll really start talking trash – and there’s no martini I can make that will help with that headache.

Ah, the free sample—staple of bakeries and food courts everywhere. “Hey buddy, check out this ginger chicken on a toothpick!”

That’s confidence, right? This stuff is so good you just taste it and you’ll want to buy it.

You know what I love about the food court sample? It’s always there. Sometimes on a busy day I just walk back and forth grabbing toothpick after toothpick. Score!

Think they notice it’s me over and over? Think they care? Listen, the chicken is cooked anyway, someone’s got to eat it.

When the day comes that I’m hungry enough, I’ll buy a meal. In the meantime I tell hungry friends to go eat there—ooh, did someone say viral marketing?

And now is when I compare ginger chicken to Web applications.

I just finished an online whiteboard collaboration with my team that works 80 miles away from me, and it was fantastic. “Oh, WebEx,” you say. “Maybe MS LiveMeeting or Adobe Connect.” Nope. Check out vYew, a FREE online collaboration and conferencing tool. It rocks.

Their model is much like the ginger-chicken-on-a-toothpick model (as taught at Wharton). After a simple registration, I get a taste of the chicken, not the whole bird. But I can return again and again whenever I need it. No trial expiration, no watermarked examples.

Much like the generous folks at 37 Signals, which offers up free online tools like Campfire (group chat) and Basecamp (project management), vYew is giving away their product to folks who need just a little bit. Currently, I may only need to use this online collaboration tool a few times a year, but now that the sample hooked me, it means two things:

1. If I need more (more pages, file uploads, etc.) I will become a paying customer to them as opposed to one of the other players
2. I’m telling other people (you) about them

Great product. Great model.

I was completely reeled in by this video, forgetting that hotel lobby security cams usually don’t have such excellent resolution; nor are hotel lobbies equipped with such excellent acoustics.

All that aside, the video does what a viral video is supposed to do . . . entertain the hell out of me. Of course I followed the link at the end, and while I’m not a big fan of interactive image-based navigation (I spend too much time clicking on flower arrangements and ashtrays hoping they do something) I hung in long enough to pick up the push about the Cisco Mobile Unified Communicator.

Hunting to get that pitch seemed more than a bit antithetical to the campaign’s overarching message. But they eventually get their point across — and that is still one funny clip.