One to One Interactive has released a study conducted by OTOInsights, its research/neuromarketing arm, that examines why some Internet videos go viral.

General Findings

[D]ata from the study does not suggest any correlation between engagement, emotion, and the length of a video. Long videos (three minutes or greater) and short videos (two minutes or less) are equally likely to have high or low engagement scores. This finding suggests that Internet videos do not need to be limited to sound bite productions or even standard television commercial length. Internet video viewers are willing to view longer productions so long as they’re engaging.

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Insight 1: Viewer Responses to Internet Videos are Emotionally Complex
… Marketers need to be aware of the range and complexity of emotional responses to quickly consumed and produced digital creatives like Internet video. Similarly, marketers need to guard against allowing their research and analysis methods to become overly reductive about emotional response. Emotional states are seldom monolithic. Even if the videos seem self-evident in their meanings, viewers’ reactions to them are quietly sophisticated.

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Insight 2:  Engagement Scores Substantially Enhance Interpretability of User Ratings
Marketers designing and evaluating digital media creative assets are not well served by the lack of feedback provided by common ratings systems. Given the importance of ratings systems in video popularity…, it is critical that marketers develop a better understanding of why users might give a video an undesirable rating.

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Insight 3: Viewer Engagement and Video Success are Positively Linked
This data suggests that a certain level of emotional engagement is a necessary, though not sufficient, predictor of a viral video’s success. In other words, it is unlikely that a video lacking a certain amount of emotional engageability will spread virally, regardless of other factors. At the same time, just because a video has this emotional engageability by no means guarantees that it will go viral; other factors (e.g., word of mouth, computer-based recommendation systems, and trendy cultural topics and memes) will influence a given video’s viral ability.

Some of the methods and findings rely too heavily on OTOInsights proprietary methodology to be immediately applicable to most people.  But if you’re considering employing video in your marketing efforts,  the general points are helpful reminders and challenges to the often simplistic ideas we have about what makes for successful videos.

(Hat tip to Roger Dooley of Neuromarketing.)

My colleague, Leigh Anne, recently brought the Digital Youth Project to my attention. It is the largest and most comprehensive study of kids’ internet use ever to be undertaken.

The three general objectives of the project were to:

• Describe kids as active innovators using digital media rather than as passive consumers of popular culture or academic knowledge.
• Think about the implications of kids’ innovative cultures for schools and higher education and to engage in a dialogue with educational planners.
• Advise software designers about how to use kids’ innovative approaches to knowledge and learning in building better software.

The project lasted three years and its results can be found in a 55-age white paper, a two-page brief, and a full-length book entitled , “Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media.” It included the work of 28 researchers and research collaborators and was funded by the MacArthur Foundation. It’s a fascinating read and worthwhile for anyone who works in education or youth marketing or just wants to stay abreast of how the youth of today experience and approach internet use.

Social-network analyst Valdis Krebs spoke at the most recent PopTech conference about the top ten social networking trends.  No podcast yet, but Wired does give an overview of some of his research, which looks at how networks added to steroid use in baseball and how networks narrow our focus rather than celebrate diversity:

According to Krebs, [the] insight that a social network creates a pseudo-truth that overrides real, objective truth, can help explain why pack mentality dominates the web.

Using the current election as a model, Krebs says that the internet does not bring people with different ideas together. Instead, people seek out groups with similar ideologies, which makes them less prone to objective, flexible thinking. And no matter how extreme the idea, there’s someone out there on the web who will build a forum around it.

Psychological research has shown that when people find their “political mirrors,” they immediately build clusters around their ideas. This is why politicians’ use of confrontational language like, “You’re either with us, or with the terrorists,” seems to work.

But Krebs sees the positive side of social networks as well. He believes that serious analysis of networks can be used constructively from the outside. The key, he says, is identifying the strong individuals or groups that can lead to group-thinking shifts.

For example, analyzing the rise of the iPod can be used by other companies to chip away at Apple’s dominance.

When Apple released the iPod, there were other MP3 players with better audio or a cheaper price. But Apple created a network by connecting groups through an easy operating system and with marketing.

[...]

In the immediate future, Krebs sees social networks facing a decidedly human problem. They need to find a compromise between the seemingly infinite number of network connections and the limited interaction capacity of human beings.

Peter Schilling, Amherst College’s director of information technology, put together the numbers on the use of technology by this year’s incoming class of 438 students. Here are some of the stats:

• Percentage of first-year applicants who applied online in 2003: 33%
• Percentage of applicants who did last year: 89%
• By the end of August 2008 the total number of members and posts at the Amherst College Class of 2012 Facebook group: 432 members and 3,225 posts
• Students in the class of 2012 who registered computers, IPhones, game consoles, etc. on the campus networks: 370 students registered 443 devices.
• Number of students in the class of 2012 who brought desktop computers to campus: 14
• Number that brought iPhones/iTouches: 93
• Likelihood that a student with an iPhone/iTouch is in the class of 2012: approximately 1 in 2
• Total number of students on campus this year that have landline phone service: 5

Schilling wanted “to tell the story of the changes occurring here and now in the life of the College.” I’m sure a similar story is being repeated at colleges and universities across the country.

More: IT Index

Thinking about conducting research?

Sam Ladner has been discussing the differences between qualitative and quantitative research on her blog, Design Research, and has added a nice, succinct post that gets at the fundamental benefits of qualitative research, viz. that it’s empathetic–the researcher identifies with the user’s experience more fully and can therefore understand what the user is thinking.

Sam is talking specifically about research for technology designers, but everything she says is equally applicable and critical for a process as fraught with emotion and uncertainty as choosing a school.

Last week, AdAge ran an article about corporations rethinking the value of question-and-answer consumer surveys. While still spending lots and lots of money on survey-based research, major companies like Procter & Gamble and Unilever are starting to focus on “digital chatter,” the comments and insights provided on blogs and social networks, as better indicators of customer attitudes.

Why the shift?

“You can’t ask people what they want, because what they say and what they do are two different things,” said Artie Bulgrin, senior VP-research and sales for ESPN…. “We can actually improve our [initiative's] success rate if we just listen a bit more … on a passive basis.”

If what people say and do differ when it comes to something like laundry detergent and frozen foods, imagine the discrepancies when it comes to decisions they’re emotionally invested in, like choosing a school. And imagine the discrepancies when your respondents are seventeen years old. (Some schools are already engaging in this kind of digital listening and qualitative analysis for precisely these reasons.)

This article also reminded me of a terrific blog entry by John Bell on “digital listening” from August that’s well worth checking out (h/t Jenny): Digital PR Skills 2008: Deploy Live “Listening Posts”

The full AdAge article is here.