Despite the number of avenues available (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter), it's not easy for songs, videos or blogs to get noticed on the Net. Yet some of them go viral and become urban legends. What's the secret? IF YOU MANAGE TO REACH A HUNDRED THOUSAND VIEWS, YOU ARE ON A ROLL
O N THE evening of November 21, 2011, a strange-looking 10-letter word became the number one trending topic on Twitter. No one knew what it meant but everyone was suitably intrigued. The word read #kolaveridi.
Clicking on it opened up a series of tweets, all with links to a YouTube page. Loading the video revealed a wholly unremarkable-looking man singing strange lyrics to a catchy beat in a recording studio as two pretty women looked on.
Closer inspection revealed that one of those women was actress Shruti Haasan. Then, the dam exploded ­ something happened along the way (God knows what!) ­ and the song Why This Kolaveri Di from an upcoming Tamil film called 3 went viral. It broke all records to become the number one searched-for song on YouTube from India. In less than two weeks, it received 17 million views and more than 75,000 comments from over 130 countries. Kolaveri, a chilled out, irreverent song about heartbreak, became the national anthem for a generation of `soup boys' who ensured its popularity by playing it 24/7 on cellphones, in cars, as dialer tunes and more; and Dhanush, superstar Rajinikanth's son-in-law, went from being a South Indian star to a household name. “It was like magic. Like some superior power was at work.
You can't predict these things. Never,“ he says. Indeed, the video has sparked hundreds of spin-offs, sequels, spoofs and remixes, each of which has gone viral in its own right ­ there's a heavy metal version of Kolaveri Di, a Marathi version, a female version, a cute-as-hell version by Sonu Nigaam's four-year-old son and even one that stars ­ go figure ­ Adolf Hitler! The Japanese are dancing to it; heck, there's even Kolaveri merchandise. And despite some criticism ­ lyricist Javed Akhtar called it a song with an ordinary tune, substandard singing and words that insult sensibilities ­ the juggernaut shows no signs of slowing down.
So what makes things go viral on the Internet? As it turns out, there is no easy answer THE RHYTHM'S GONNA GET YOU...
Viral videos are videos with a high percentage of social views. They are videos that become popular ­ no, larger than life ­ through sharing. The hits come from external links, embeds, typed or copied URLs. You would typically stumble upon virals on your Facebook wall shared by friends, in your Twitter stream and sometimes, in your email. But there really is no science to figure out why videos go viral. “Trying to predict which videos are going to `go viral' is a bit like catching lightning in a bottle ­ extremely hard to predict!“ says a YouTube spokesperson (and you thought at least they would know!).
Sometimes, a video can be on the site for months (the famous `Double Rainbow,' a 2010 video about a vivid `double rainbow' at Yosemite National Park in the US that now has over 31 million views) before it is picked up.
Others, like the hilarious `David After Dentist' (a video about a little boy with a cute lisp describing what happened at the dentist) had 10 million views after just two weeks. The most viewed video on YouTube is `Charlie Bit My Finger ­ Again', which got 85 million views in the first year and now has a massive 250 million and is the most watched video on YouTube. “The only thing that we can say about viral videos is that they tend to share a few characteristics,“ says the YouTube spokesperson. “Like any news story, they are authentic, surprising and often topical.“
To be fair, 99 per cent of the videos on YouTube don't get anywhere near Kolaveri's 17 million views. Most are lucky to get even a thousand.
2008's hilarious `Benny Lava' video that featured Prabhudeva is still shy of 30 lakh views even after almost four years. So what makes a video stand out from a crowd? Last year, a company called Dynamic Logic that analyses Internet trends studied popular online videos to solve the mystery. According to them, any viral piece of content should have the following characteristics: It should be unique, something that has never been seen before There should be considerable shock value A local or global community participates and becomes a part of it It has a compelling and heart-touching message All of which, we think, Kolaveri does exceedingly well. “I think the song appeals to so many

people for a number of reasons ­ the music is hummable, the lyrics are really simple and heartbreak is an emotion that appeals to everybody. We put it up on the Internet because somehow, we were sure that the song would travel beyond its core markets of Chennai and South India,“ says Arjun Sankalia, director, special projects, Sony Music India. The way in which a piece of content begins its long and arduous journey to becoming a sought-after viral is fairly innocuous. A creator ­ the person who creates the content, either for the express purpose of posting it online or simply on a whim ­ uploads the video to a site like YouTube (or a blog) and starts sharing it in the usual hubs on online activity ­ typically social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. “This initial seeding is extremely important and is the toughest part,“ says Simarprit Singh, internet evangelist and founder of MapsofIndia.com. “The trick is to subtly push your content but not shove it in people's faces.“ The first 1,000 views are the most difficult to get, says Singh. “If you reach 10,000, you're slowly getting some traction. If you reach a hundred thousand, you're really on a roll. And if you cross a million, boy, have you made it!“ he says and adds that he expects Kolaveri to peak at about 25 million views before the hype slowly dies down.

I WANT TO BREAK FREE Adman Prahlad Kakkar has a completely different take on viral content. “One, you must remember that the viral phenomenon is nothing new,“ he says. “Before the Internet, it existed as word of mouth. Later, it existed as chain emails. The only difference today is that what took a month to propagate now takes less than 24 hours.“
Kakkar believes that the rise of viral videos today is the beginning of a new war ­ the war between the suits and the yahoos, as he calls it.
“Conventional advertising,“ he muses, “or publicity, is essentially done under a brief from a (suitably) suited corporate honcho who handles the money. It is the complete anti-thesis to viral.
These `suits' cannot realise the potential of something going viral unless they are willing to become unconventional and break all the rules that the yahoos (the creative people) yearn to break all the time.“ Viral videos are essentially successful because they are in essence non-conformist, anticonvention, anti-establishment, thinks Kakkar.
“The viral phenomenon is a free beast by nature. The content is viral because it takes on a life of its own. Then, it is not in the creators'

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