An amazing film or magazine article can overcome a bad title. But online content with a bad headline will never get clicked on — let alone quickly Dugg or retweeted. The overabundance of good web content leaves people with little attention to spare on anything but the most tempting, succulent descriptions.

Wait for the epiphany where the perfect headline appears “in lights,” then go write your viral piece.

Too often… when working with friends and clients on viral content ideas… we’d get excited about a cool concept that can’t easily be expressed in under 65-or-so characters and then spend hours creating the content. As a very last step, they turn to the headline box and struggle to come up with something even passably awkward. Inevitably, the piece bombed… and left them with a terrible social media hangover after all that hard, creative work. Many repeated disappointments inspired me to change my workflow:

Brainstorm a list of incredible, magnetic headlines first. Once you have a stash of golden, “sure-fire winner” headlines, then go create the content that unquestionably fulfills the promise made by each of them.

Not every “cool” content concept has potential for a winning headline. By finding that out first, and then eliminating the ideas that are unlikely to be clicked on and shared – you can focus your energy on creating hit content for those headlines that do have a fighting chance.

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When someone leaves a comment on my blog, it’s like a drug. I feel a slight physical rush of endorphin and adrenaline. I beam with pride for a split second… and soon I crave more of it.

It’s like money, too. Comments are the currency of social media. They reflect people’s attention and interest — and offer social proof that your stuff is worth reading and talking about.

Strike the social media ‘Jackpot’ and get a huge buzz + hundreds of comments. Image: Rich & Becky

But unfortunately, when you first start blogging or using social media sites, the recognition you get for all your hard work is usually pathetic. Exhausted after busting ass for the virtual equivalent of $0.07 cents an hour in comments, most bloggers quit too soon. But if you are both creative and persistent enough – you’ll eventually strike The Jackpot.

‘The Jackpot’ is what I call the spectacular, avalanche-like chain reaction when several thousand people buzz over your latest content… and many of them leave comments & share it with their followers.

Focusing on these 6 key elements will boost your odds of striking it big:

1. The headline is key.

If you headline isn’t compelling, people will never even click the link to see your content in the first place. The top, big-money copywriters sometimes spend a week writing an advertisement and then they spend an entire week tweaking the headline. It’s that important. Don’t ever treat the headline as an afterthought. For an important piece, you should open up a text editor and write out 20 variations of the headline and pick the best. Then DM or IM a trusted friend and ask for their tweaks and feedback.

2. Visual appeal is key.

Beautiful design + images draw people into your content & keep them reading. image: j. Philipson

If you want people take your message seriously and recommend it to all their friends…looks matter The visual appeal of your content includes both your site’s logo, design, and text typography — and also the images you use to illustrate your points. If you aren’t good with graphic design & CSS you need to either learn it or else hire a professional designer to make your site look slick. And if you don’t know about image resources for bloggers like Flickr Creative Commons, Wikimedia commons and commercial stock photo sites – you should take time to learn about them before you hit “Publish” again.

3. Timing is key.

Impeccably timing your content can have an explosive effect. image: baking with medusa

Breaking news in your industry can score you major buzz. If you don’t have an inside scoop, you can create your own news by summarizing what has happened recently and adding your perspective to it. Creating content to coincide with a holiday, release date, or industry announcement can also work wonders. One of my most successful pieces was a parody of Microsoft ads, submitted to Digg the day after the site announced an unpopular advertising partnership with Microsoft. I noticed that the community was starting to grumble, so I stayed up all night and cranked out something to exploit their anti-Microsoft sentiment. It probably wouldn’t have hit so big at any other time.

4. Intuition is key.

Use the collective intelligence of the social web to sharpen your intuition. image: kees straver

Social media is a digital reflection of the non-local, collective consciousness of everyone online. If you can intuitively sense what the collective is thinking or craving, you can create a monster hit. But the only way to cultivate this intuition is through extensive experience and active presence in the trenches of social media.

Spend at least an hour a day on popular content aggregation sites like TweetMeme, PopURLs, Digg, StumbleUpon and Delicious to see what is generating massive buzz. Ask questions on Twitter and do searches to see what people are burning to know about.

Then mix the successful formulas you discover on aggregator sites with your own ideas and angles until a burning, exploding, bomb flash of creativity jolts through you. When you burst with out-loud with laughter or quiver with excitement over your own idea… you’re onto something. Check it out with a friend or two and see if it moves them, too. If they think it’s a likely winner, go for it!

5. Influential friends are key.

If someone influential tweets your content, blogs about it or submits it to Digg… thousands more people are likely to take a look at it. Therefore, it’s important to spend time befriending powerful social media users. Follow them, chat with them, help them out, read their blogs and leave comments, promote their content and eventually they will notice you. And if they like you and your stuff, they might be willing to help you back. Yes, it takes a lot of time to network with people, but this is social marketing, after all. If you don’t know where to find powerful influencers, here are some places you can start looking.

6. Persistence is key.

Build your empire one story at a time. Keep trucking, don’t look back. image: Liber

If you walk into the casino with a half-dozen quarters, odd are high that you’re gonna walk out empty handed. Same will happen if you write 6 blog entries and then give up. You’ve gotta be willing to try dozens, or even hundreds of times, if you wanna hit the big time. While writing for Social Media RockstarI have gotten discouraged, slightly depressed and I even wanted to quit a couple of times. Some of my posts didn’t go very far, but the few that did generate bigger buzz made it all worthwhile. So expect 75% or more of your posts to fail, and keep on trying and improving your game each time!

You’ll Know You’ve Stuck the Jackpot, When…

• Your inbox spits out comment notification e-mails like a machine gun.
• You get more ReTweets in an hour than you’ve gotten in the previous year.
• There’s so many questions from new followers & in comments that it’s hard to answer ‘em.
• Your piece suddenly goes popular on other social networks you didn’t submit it to.
• Your contact form returns press & business inquiries.
• Trackbacks in appear in languages you can’t even identify, proving global popularity.

When the chain reaction explodes… you might find yourself ‘glued to the screen’ and excited to the point that you physically feel (or hear) your heartbeat racing. Take a deep breath, and try to think clearly about how to best spread the bushfire while it’s still blazing. Alert your friends to help fan the flames, add new social voting buttons and submit it to niche social sites, and do what you can to respond to comments and mails… making connections and turning your new visitors into subscribers or customers.

But there’s only so much you can do before all the attention will psychologically overwhelm and exhaust you. At that point… it’s totally okay to shut the lid on your laptop, open the lid on a beer and congratulate yourself on a job well done. You rocked it!

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Dan Zarrella is a Boston-based marketer with strong skills in programming, research and social media marketing. He is known for creating widely-used social media tools and for his scientific approach to marketing. Not satisfied with merely publishing his own opinions and thoughts, Dan is driven to demystify the exciting-but-hazy world of viral marketing with research and provable facts. He also wants to make life easier for future generations of marketers by developing re-usable software tools and process frameworks.

What do you do for work? And for fun?

“I just started a new job at a company in Cambridge called Hubspot. They’re an inbound marketing software company, and I’m a marketing manager there. For fun, I’m really into social media stuff – Twitter, my blog, etc.”

Dan partying in Boston with Alison Driscol @alisond (left) and her friend.

You describe yourself as a ‘viral marketing scientist.’ Which aspects of viral marketing are difficult to research and investigate?

“I think when you start getting into the motivation of what makes people want to spread something, that’s where it get tricky. I can study analytically things like: what sort of content spreads, what times, who spreads it… but to try to get into the ‘why‘ people spread something or their emotional motivations – that’s a little more difficult. I did a survey last year that was sort of a broad ‘content sharing on the web’ kind of thing, and I found that a lot of people don’t know ‘why‘ they do stuff online…”

There’s this mystique about viral marketing – that it’s difficult, dangerous or unreliable. Can an average person, company or agency realistically be successful at it?

“The first thing people have to understand is that you can’t guarantee results with each individual campaign. It’s like a raffle – if you buy ten tickets (or you do ten campaigns) – one of them or a few of them are more likely to go viral. There are some risks associated with it… The trick to avoid the risk is to be very transparent about what you’re doing. Don’t try to hide the fact that you’re marketing – people will find out – and that can cause bigger problems…

Unraveling the mystery of what makes an idea go viral. image: MC =).

The goal of my research is to breakdown ‘what makes things go viral‘ so that marketers can implement that – so they’ll have a framework for working on things. They’ll know what kind of things they can put into their campaigns to make them go viral. Outside of the scientific work that I’m doing – and a couple other people do – viral marketing is this ‘rockstar’ thing where someone comes up with a crazy idea – and I’m trying to break it down into a more viable science.

In addition to my scientific work, I’ve been reading a lot of academic papers and books about pre-Web forms of viral marketing – content that spreads: like gossip, legends and rumors. I’m looking forward to publishing a book at some point.”

How important is an understanding of psychology or sociology?

Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs.

“I don’t have a formal background in either of those two fields – the knowledge I have comes from studying things like how rumors and gossip spread. I do think stuff like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is important to understanding what people need and how you can give them what they need. And from sociology: economic theory and game theory – the ideas behind things like informational cascades and social proof is very important.”

You do a lot of reading. What are the most essential works that influenced your career?

“The book that started me down this path is actually a work of fiction: Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson. The villain in the book constructs a mental ‘mind virus’ that he infects the world with… and the bad guys do nefarious things with it. That book opened my eyes to what viral marketing could be if it were expanded to a science.

For academic stuff, I like JSTOR – which I can use with my Boston Public Library card. Access to that database has been really key for me to understanding very specific things like psychology and sociology… Also, all the work on memetics – not even necessarily The Selfish Gene, which was Richard Dawkins’ book that introduced the concept of the meme – but more like Susan Blackmore’s The Meme Machine – which I think is the seminal work on memetics.”

Seth Godin’s stuff like Unleashing the Idea Virus was pretty influential, as was Malcom Gladwell’s The Tipping Point.”

You’ve made some successful tools (i.e.,Tweetbacks) to extend Twitter’s reach and functionality. What could be improved with Twitter?

“The big architectural issue with Tweetbacks, my platform to integrate Twitter comments into Wordpress blogs and encourage ReTweeting, is that most people are tweeting shortened URLs – and there’s no easy way to expand these shortened URLs into long ones. I’ve had to do some hackish things to make that work.

At a Twitter level, what I wish they’d do is: if a Tweet has a shortened link in it, then expand that out to the full URL – and then publish the full URL in the API. This would really help understand and sort what links people are sharing on Twitter – and it would take the Tweetbacks concept to a new and much more powerful level.”

I was on IRC in the 90s and I thought it was more advanced and useful than Twitter, in some ways. Is Twitter kind of messy or noisy – or do you like it how it is?

“I like Twitter the way it is. The way they built it seems to be: if you want to start filtering it and breaking things down into groups – they give you API access and there’s a lot of things that allow you to do that. I use Tweetdeck, which allows me to have searches and columns. I’m not even following most of the people I talk to on a daily basis – but I have searches set up so that if someone talks about my interests, I’m gonna see it.

I think that as more people get into things like Twitter, the client tools will definitely have to improve. As long as social media sites maintain an open infrastructure, I’m sure there will be developers building solutions for what people need. Everyone doesn’t use these tools the same way – and having the innovation at the client level gives everyone a chance to find something that works the way they want it to.”

How will things change when mainstream society and all the Fortune 500 companies and political movements fully embrace social media?

“I definitely think that more businesses will start to engage in social media – and there is the possibility that some of these agencies or brands will start to do inauthentic and spammy things. The difference is: prior to the web, they used to get away with stuff like that – because people didn’t have a peer-to-peer media to allow them to talk with the same reach that big corporation had. So I think that as corporations try and get into social media, if they do things wrong, they will get caught. The market is always going to be a little bit smarter and faster than you are. Trying to trick it will never work for any long-term period.”

@danzarrella & @alisond at the Shorty Awards ‘09.

Is there anything you personally find cliche, annoying or lame about the Twitter / Web 2.0 culture?

“Um, I don’t know if I find things ‘lame’ or ‘cliche.’ Maybe I find that they’re ‘not for me.’ Social media has the tendency to attract certain personalities. There are Paris Hilton types in social media — people who are famous only for being famous. That’s something I’m not a huge, huge fan of.”

Who is a cutting-edge thinker that you follow closely?

“The one big guy who has been very influential to my work on Twitter is Hugh McCloud (@gapingvoid). He has a very different approach, his is much less scientific… but he has a very strong ability to put his finger on things – and be right about them. I really wish I was that creative – I feel like I have more of an analytical mind.

Cartoonist Hugh McCloud @ www.gapingvoid.com

There are a lot of people where I follow some of their work, but maybe not all of their work. I follow 1,000 people on Twitter – but I don’t need followers so I don’t follow people whose content I don’t want.”

What are some of your marketing goals?

“Publishing a book is one of my long-term goals for quite a while now – doing the homework and the research, putting myself in the place where I can write a book. Beyond that, I’d like to have a framework that people who do viral marketing will find useful. Maybe a site where they can have a framework and set of tools that are repeatable and useful – to take some of the “rockstar” and mystique out of viral marketing. But I don’t know if there is a platform-agnostic toolset to do a lot of that stuff (i.e., something that’ll work equally well on Twitter, Digg, etc.)

Also in a more theoretical fashion, like in Design Thinking by David Kelly at Ideo, would be a way of thinking about things: Here’s what I want to spread. Here’s the first thing to do. Here’s the next step.

So a little bit shorter term, a few months out – an actual toolset to help people get retweeted more on Twitter, specifically – is around the corner.

It’s not an easy problem to solve, so I’m working on a lot of different avenues to tackle it: The content of the tweet has to be optimized for re-tweetability, there’s timing concerns, influence – e.g., who needs to tweet it so it’ll get retweeted eventually – but I think it’s a do-able tool.”

Dan polishing off a pint after speaking at PubCon ‘08 – Vegas.

Where can people find you online?

Feel free to follow me on Twitter (“@danzarrella“) or check out my viral marketing blog. Thanks!

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Social media marketing is a tricky balance. If you can come up with a viral smash hit, there’s nothing better. But if you grossly underestimate the intelligence of the community you’re targeting- it can create devastating backlash. It can also be unintentionally hilarious…

image: Tinou

1st Place: SEO Spam Extravaganza on Digg

This week an internet marketing consultant tried to game Digg with a gaudy salesletter post — pumped up by bought votes and fake comments.

Several dozen sock puppet accounts dived in, leaving comments faker than a $5 Rolex at the Bangkok Flea Market:

The pièce de résistance was the blatant instructions on how to Digg the post — in case the hired $0.50-per-Digg shills weren’t sure on how to press the button — with a promise of a ‘very special prize’:

Actually, we “dugg” everything about this whole attempt so much… that we decided to award this whole fiasco with a very special prize of its own… the 1st gold place cup in the Social Marketing Hall of Shame!

2nd Place: Chain E-mail Forwarding FAIL

This tweet by had me swiveling out of my chair with laughter:

Todd is a witty search marketing pro, who moonlights as an HR guy. He frequently leaves scorching-but-funny commentary about incompetent job applications on his Twitter stream.

Chain e-mail forwarding is technically “social media”…. a way of sharing viral content with your friends… albeit, a very old-fashioned one. We generally recommend more sophisticated, “Web 2.0″ channels for sharing links your links, like Twitter or Digg.

But if you absolutely must forward that lurid urban legend Aunt Carolyn sent ya, don’t hit “CC: Entire Address Book” while you’re applying for a job. In this case, it cost someone a job interview, but it did earn a 2nd place silver cup in the Social Marketing Hall of Shame:

3rd Place: Reddit Ringtone Sham

An enterprising spammer created a “official sounding” Reddit account (called “AdminBot”) and used it send private messages pimping a spammy ringtone subscription site:

While the spam effort itself is ho-hum, the sheer awfulness of the copywriting was epic. We “appreciate” your copywriting so much, please accept this bronze award and permanent place in the Social Marketing Hall of Shame as “proof” of “the fact” that we got a major kick out of this!

Runner Up: DUI Attorney Twitter Spam

You should never Tweet while drunk. You’re liable to attract the attention of ambulance-chasing Twitter spammers like this one:

If you come across more examples of gut wrenching social media “marketing” that you’d like to see featured in future installments of the Hall of Shame, please contact me for immediate consideration.

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Ross Borden is the owner and content director at the Matador Network – an online travel magazine that has recently exploded in popularity with well-written, beautifully illustrated travel articles and lists. Matador’s content is very appealing to social media and social news site participants… earning thousands of links from all over the Web. He recently took some time to offer some of his hard-won insights on viral marketing and web publishing to Social Media Rockstar readers.

Tell us about Matador Travel?

“We are the world’s first interactive travel magazine. As a traveler, I didn’t like going through a bunch of travel sites and wading through thousands of reviews written by people who were essentially on vacation there – people who didn’t know a thing about the place. Matador is a place where you can read professionally written content by people who live there, speak the language and know everything about the place – and we have a social networking linking the whole place together. It’s a community where you can reach out to people and ask questions. It’s a really interactive way to get the best travel information on the Web.”

Ross + a friend high above the clouds in Columbia.

How did you get into social media?

“I had been traveling for a year and I came back to San Francisco and got a job in sales at Oracle. I really didn’t like being stuck in a cubicle and making cold calls all day. I had been away from the Web cause I’d been traveling in South America. When I got back, so much had changed and it all really dawned on me. What really inspired me to write the original business plan was that we were entering into an era where the unknown little guys could take on the big guys. Where if you created compelling content and cool applications – you could literally steal market share from the huge companies that had been running things for the past 50 years. That excited me.”

Seth Godin talks about building fresh new organizations that fit the social media culture and vibe. Any thoughts on this?

“Seth is a marketing genius and a visionary – I agree with him on that. The old media giants are getting a lot of things wrong. That’s because they didn’t start from scratch. They’re trying to not only trying to apply a “2009 social media” aspect to what they do, but a lot of times they fight what’s happening on the internet. It goes way back to when Steve Jobs had the infamous meeting with the music executives and they told him to “Go fuck yourself!” – and… just look at iTunes now. And look where the record industry is! I think it’s the same thing with all the big, old media gaints. It’s important to look and see what’s really working on the web – and to build your social media organization (by) harnessing what’s already popular.”

Where do you get your story ideas from?

“I try to expose myself to as much news and media as I can. It’s a crazy world we’re living in, in 2009, and there are certain things that just blow me away. Anything that really makes an impression on me right away is going to make an impression on other people. I go through hundreds of RSS feeds and headlines in social news, and I look for something that catches my eye and really makes a strong impression on me.”

What are some of the essential elements for crafting a great linkbait / social media story?

“The no brainers are stuff like lists, ya know, ‘Top 10 Superlatives.’ Deeper than that, you either want to shock someone or you want to give people value. Teach someone. Give people resources so that it’s not just a time waster or attention grabber… but so they’re getting some insight into something that they care about by reading your article.”

Ross living on the edge @ Yosemite National Park, California, USA.

What quirks do social news site users have?

“All web users have really, really short attention spans. They have they world at their fingertips, but a lot of time they are at work when they are consuming social media. I’d say that social media users have the shortest attention span of any web user. That’s because there’s 100 other popular stories they’re trying to check out. So an important insight for being successful is you really have to grab users of social news sites with something riveting – like a great photo – right in the beginning of the article. You don’t want to lose them right after they get to your site.”

Who you you admire as some of the most successful viral content creators out there?

“I would say that Green Options Media does really well – and so does Weburbanist. Those are two of my favorite sites to visit. Then there’ the classics like Cracked and Holy Taco. Those guys have a really good grip on how to succeed on Digg. That kind of content is not as compelling to me because it’s more of just the shock and entertainment factor, where something like Green Options and Web Urbanist is showing you something you’ve never seen before or providing insight into news. I get more out of those sites.”

Have there any side-effects of having content go popular on a social media site?

“Since we’ve gotten into viral marketing, I’ve been initially surprised by a lot of the super cynical comments that get left. But I guess that’s to be expected when 100,000 people read your article in the same week.

One of our community members, who teaches English in Japan, posted a photo of a hilarious essay that one of his 3rd grade student had written. It was popular, but there were a lot of people who were very critical, saying that it was wrong to post a Student’s essay. I was floored that people couldn’t find humor in that.”

Funny Engrish = Viral Ignition

What were your greatest travel adventures?

“Hitchhiking through East Africa for a number of months. I did a stint working in some African primary schools. It was great working with the kids. The ultimate, all-you-can-handle adventure was hitchhiking by myself through Kenya. I would note that I never felt any danger and I think African people are some of the nicest people I’ve ever encountered.

 

After graduating college, I went with my friend to South America, and we climbed some of the biggest mountains on the continent. That was another great adventure.”

What other amazing travel sites should we check out?

“I set out to make a travel site because I didn’t like a lot of the other travel sites out there. They’re overly monetized – I mean it’s like spam – almost all of it. You’re trying to get pushed into buying a cruise package or getting a flight deal. Elevate Destinations is a great outfitter – they give a lot of money back to the communities and they support conservation. iExplore is another leader. Wend is another great online + print magazine many people don’t know about.”

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