Whenever you want to get better at something, it’s a good idea to go and sit at the feet of someone who’s already successful at it.  It’s why carpenters and blacksmiths used to have apprentices.  It’s why NFL teams draft young quarterbacks a few years earlier than they expect to need them, so they can watch the seasoned veteran lead by example.

Learning by watching is also a fantastic strategy for video creators, as it gives you a glimpse into the mind of the viral viewer.  That’s why we started this column—so we could point out some current trends in video concept and production that are surging in popularity.  Jumping on a hot genre or style of video can provide a huge kick-start in initial views for your next video offering.

A new ad from Microsoft got me thinking about this week’s trend: Jumping on the latest memes.

Looking Back

A “meme” is defined by Wikipedia as a concept that spreads swiftly via the Internet.  From time to time, certain corners of the web get a bit obsessed with a particular kind of joke or reference, resulting in a large amount of new content that plays off that joke.  And video producers are not immune from this kind of behavior—in fact, we sometimes flock to it.  Referencing a pre-existing joke, meme, story, or reference is a sure-fire way to capture some added buzz upon launch, particularly from search.

In just the past year, we’ve seen several examples of viral hits that were playing on a recent Internet meme, including:

• The Bed Intruder Song, which was playing off the original Antoine Dodson news interview.  The song has cracked top-seller lists on iTunes and has even spawned several more spoofs, parodies, and homages.  So many millions of video views spawned off a single phenomenon.
• There are too many Downfall-related videos to count, but I’m sure you’ve seen some of them, like the one with Hitler reacting to the World Cup Vuvuzelas, or to the news of Lebron James heading to Miami, or to the iPad.
• You might remember Carmax’s attempt to ride the Dramatic Chipmunk meme to Super Bowl Commercial glory with this ad (it doesn’t have a mind-blowing number of views, but it was also posted on several other platforms following the 2010 Super Bowl).

Recent Meme-Inspired Success

Memes aren’t going to go away.  Sure, new ones will emerge and older ones will fade.  But the meme, as an institution, will remain for a long time to come, especially as we get more social online.  Viral videos that jump on the latest memes are just as certain to continue as well.  If a video creator can strike while the iron is hot on a particularly popular online gag, it can garner tens of thousands of views in a matter of hours.

Microsoft is demonstrating this trend in fine fashion this week, with a new commercial for their Windows Live Photo Gallery.  It features the star of a recent viral success—Bear, the Double Rainbow guy, who simply filmed a double rainbow and his own over-the-top reaction to it.  He laughs, he cries, he exclaims, and he generally acts like he’s having a religious experience. If you haven’t seen the original, enjoy it now:

And now check out video Microsoft created by jumping on this latest meme:

This is a very smart idea.  The original Double Rainbow video is still quite popular, it’s viral star not quite burned out.  So the timing of the reference is perfect.

Additionally, they’re doing a lot more here to play off the original than simply hiring Bear to stand there and praise Microsoft.  They actually wrote the commercial script in a way that Bear’s appearance makes perfect sense.  They referenced not only the original star of the meme, but also the content of that meme, and wrote it into their parody effort.

Of course, the best part about the video is that it’s genuinely funny.  It’s got charm and humor enough to carry the advertisement even for viewers who never heard of or saw the original.

All video creators are looking for a head start out of the gate in the race for viral success.  Jumping on the latest popular meme is a great way to achieve that, but the timing is everything.  Too soon, and your video hits before enough viewers see the original, which means they miss the reference.  Too late, and they’re already over the original, and you end up looking like a hack.  But if you hit the sweet spot on timing, you’re almost guaranteed to have a better-than-average shot at going viral.

This one was really throwing me for a day or two. I couldn’t understand why saying “foo.should == bar” wasn’t the same as “foo.should be bar”. Turns out that all variants of “be” expect the following token to be a method ending in “?” which returns a boolean.

should be
should be_true
should be_false
should be_nil
should be_arbitrary_predicate(*args)
should_not be_nil
should_not be_arbitrary_predicate(*args)

Given true, false, or nil, will pass if given value is true, false or nil (respectively). Given no args means the caller should satisfy an if condition (to be or not to be).

Predicates are any Ruby method that ends in a “?” and returns true or false. Given be_ followed by arbitrary_predicate (without the “?”), RSpec will match convert that into a query against the target object.

The arbitrary_predicate feature will handle any predicate prefixed with “be_an_” (e.g. be_an_instance_of), “be_a_” (e.g. be_a_kind_of) or “be_” (e.g. be_empty), letting you choose the prefix that best suits the predicate.
Examples

target.should be
target.should be_true
target.should be_false
target.should be_nil
target.should_not be_nil

collection.should be_empty #passes if target.empty?
“this string”.should be_an_intance_of(String)

target.should_not be_empty #passes unless target.empty?
target.should_not be_old_enough(16) #passes unless target.old_enough?(16)
Source

There’s no real technical knowledge to be imparted by this post. Sometimes I just have to sit back and admire the beauty of Ruby, in this case some RSpec tests I’m currently working on.

Understanding the viral marketplace is crucial to succeeding within it.  Knowing what kinds of videos users are watching and sharing can help in the conceptualizing and creating of your own masterpiece.  This column attempts to spot such trends among the recent viral successes.

There’s a video going viral that I wanted to share with you that perfectly illustrates the trend of playing around with context—of taking something familiar and expected and putting it in unfamiliar and unexpected situations.  Hollywood’s been getting mileage out of this “fish out of water” concept for decades. It’s about playing off of stereotypes.  Setting the audience up to anticipate one thing, but delivering something different… opposite… surprising.

Looking Back

In recent months, we’ve seen a number of popular videos that messed around with context.  Here are just a handful:

• The dancing policeman in Sweden.
• The fantastic Improv Everywhere group’s recent video that places Star Wars characters in the New York City subway
• Another Star Wars success was this Adidas ad for the World Cup, which took athletes, musicians, and actors and placed them in the context of the Star Wars universe.
• The Tarp Surfing video, which takes surfing into the unexpected context of a parking lot.
• The Do Tigers Like Catnip? video succeeds because it shows us something we fear—big game cats—in an unexpected context (rolling around and playful)
• Context is the key to the Bill Murray Bartending video from SXSW, because we’re used to seeing Bill Murray in movies… not mixing drinks behind a bar.
• The Swagger Wagon, a personal favorite, which takes a typical suburban minivan-owning family and places them out of context in a rap video.

Once you start paying attention, you’ll find instances of successful viral videos playing with context and expectations nearly everywhere you look.

Recent “Inverted Context” Success

In this case, we’re conditioned to think of priests as holy and reserved, going about the business of being priestly.  We don’t think of them as having mad skateboard skills.  But this one does:

This is one priest who knows his way around a skateboard.  So when he shows off his moves, we are caught off guard, which makes us actually pay closer attention.  It also shows us an authority figure—the priest—in a new light.  How often do we stop and think about the priests doing anything other than official priestly duties?  Probably not often.  And yet this man was a teenager once.  And it seems he was probably a lot more like today’s teenagers than they realized.  His skateboarding demonstration is a fantastic way for him to connect with a younger generation—showing a previously hidden side of himself by playing with context.

If you’re struggling to come up with a video concept that will grab people’s attention and hold their interest, consider changing the context. Take your familiar elements and plop them down in a setting or situation that is new and uncommon.  You might be surprised how closely people pay attention when you serve them a slice of the familiar alongside a slice of the unexpected.

If it hasn’t been made clear by the previous few technical posts, we’ve made the shift from a PHP shop to a Ruby on Rails shop.  The verdict is still out on how this technology shift will affect business value (if at all), but from an engineering standard it is really obvious how much cleaner and better designed our code is.

Additional reasons why Rails has impressed me so far are:

• Community Support
• Open source contribution
• Overall community care for good code
• Ease to produce working product
• Quick integration into new technologies
• And on and on..

I’m back with another installment of the Sharethrough Viral Video Awards, where I try to find a few of the week’s best videos that may not have caught your attention yet.   There is no science to the picks, just one man’s opinion of some diamonds in the rough from the current crop of popular videos.  Let’s get to the awards:

Best Use Of Animal Stacking

Our first award of the evening goes to a little video starring a giant rodent… riding a tortoise.  It was filmed at the Caldwell Zoo in Tyler, Texas, and the uploader initially didn’t even know what the creature was.  It’s called a hyrax, apparently.  It might be best if you just took a look:

If animals are a staple ingredient in the world of viral video, then stacking one animal on top of another ought to double its chances.  In fact, there have been one or two similar animal-riding-animal hits this year already.

Seeing one animal riding another will probably always have a certain appeal, simply because we don’t see it that often in everyday life.  Actually, until YouTube came along, I had pretty much never seen one animal ride another.  Toss in the mild initial mystery over the giant rodent’s identity, and you have a nice mix of intrigue and oddity.  This was hands-down the best animal-stacking video of the week, which is why it’s a clear winner of our first category.

Best Rapping Web Developer

I’ve seen some pretty good rap-based viral hits in my day—the rapping SEO comes to mind—but I haven’t seen a rapping web developer.  Well, I hadn’t until this week.  That’s when M.C. Dave Berzack dropped his new single, “Killa Appz,” a bit of a parody of “Paper Planes,” by MIA.  He’s got his mind on his markup and his markup on his mind:

This video is pretty great on its own, but if you happen to work in a field anywhere near web development, then it’s even better.  He squeezes in a lot of references and inside jokes for people in that line of work, but the video’s sharp humor still plays well with the general crowd too.

I would imagine his target audience—prospective customers—understand and enjoy it.  And if they’re smart enough to click through and spend some time on his portfolio, they’ll be very impressed.  It’s pretty amazing.  A great hook (the rap video) leading to a great product demonstration (the portfolio) is almost always an award-worthy combination.

Best Marketing Opportunity

Sometimes I’ll see a viral hit that feels like a perfect marketing opportunity for a particular brand or company.  For instance, when a video of this little boy’s tirade at the zoo went viral, I instantly thought that either The Gap or the zoo itself should swoop in, buy the rights, and use the content in a marketing campaign.

Our third and final award this evening goes to a clip of a gorilla playing with a Nintendo DS.  I can only assume that a child accidently dropped the gaming device into the gorilla pen, and then the animal found it.  Check it out:

I have no idea what the gorilla’s true intentions are.  And it doesn’t matter.  Because it looks like he’s playing the DS.  Which should get alarm bells ringing over at Nintendo’s marketing department.  It’s the game so great, even Donkey Kong himself can’t resist it!

That’s all the time we have for the awards this week.  I hope you’ll join us again next week for an entirely new set of random Viral Video Awards.

I have been pretty slow on starting to blog about new engineering learnings, but I could not pass after we tried this.

The idea was to check whether the class was a descendant of a particular class, and the class name was stored as a String

APP_CONFIG['creative_types'].each do |klass, config|
  lambda {
    Kernel.const_get(klass).should < Creative
  }.should_not raise_error
end

So #1,
Kernel.const_get(klass) gets the class from the String of the class name (and this should not raise an error since the array should only contain defined classes)

and #2, Creative300x250 < Creative checks whether it’s derived from Creative class, which is the main objective of the test. We can simply use the “<” after the “should” method and it just works.

Pretty cool huh?

More to come.

On July 29th, the entire Sharethrough office went out to quite possibly one of the coldest spots in San Francisco at Fort Miley. Nestled off of Ocean Beach and within walking distance of the famed Cliff House, we climbed, balanced, and had a few falls all in a fun yet challenging afternoon.

Yes, there were the dreaded trust falls, but they were used in a way to promote safety for all the climbing we were supposed to do! The Fort Miley Adventure Challenge Course is a non-profit program that encouraged us to change the way we work and solve problems together.

Here’s just a taste of what we did:

Afterwards, we sought warmth, drinks, and snacks at the Cliff House.

Check out co-founder and CTO Rob Fan going down the zip line:

A fantastic way to keep up with what viral audiences are enjoying and sharing is to simply look at what the most popular current videos are doing right.  Trends come and go in online video, just as they do in fashion or music.  But hopping on board early enough with a trendy video style is an excellent head start to finding those initial seed viewers.

A new viral hit this week reminded me of how many parodies have been successful this year.  Parody is a time-tested comedic style that, when done right, can almost always find an audience.  Unfortunately, it’s not always done right.  But there seem to be a higher number of successful parody videos than normal, and it just might indicate that the audience’s appetite for sharp satire is peaking.

Looking Back

In recent months, the video world has seen a great deal of viral success for parodies.  Here are just a few:

• The amazing BYU parody of the Old Spice Man commercials.
• The Star Wars themed parody of Jay-Z’s Empire State of Mind
• Steve Carell & Paul Rudd’s hilarious send-up of Lebron James’ ESPN “Decision” special
• The Toyota Swagger Wagon commercial, which is really a parody of the common rap song/video
• There were many successful spoofs of the Standing Cat video, like this one.
• And there was also this funny and odd Adidas spin on the original Star Wars cantina scene.

Recent Parody Success

All the videos in the list above were viral hits.  You’ve probably seen more than one of them before.  And they’re all from just this year.  Maybe more than ever, parody clips have an increased likelihood of going viral.  Like the newest member of the club, The Video Website.

The Video Website is apparently from a Jimmy Kimmel Live staffer and friends—the same group behind another parody hit from earlier this year, a combined spoof of Wes Anderson films and Spiderman--and succeeds terrifically in sending up the movie trailer for The Social Network, that movie about Facebook you’ve probably heard about.  In the parody, the website in question is YouTube, as the trailer shows snippets of the supposed drama behind the scenes of the creation of the video sharing giant.

First, take a look at the original work being parodied, the trailer for The Social Network, which is a pretty great trailer on its own right:

Now, with that fresh in your minds, take a look at the trailer for the fictional movie, The Video Website:

There are so many great parallels in this parody, such as the confusion over the number of hits each site received, the music, the board room scene at the end, and a lot more.  And all those beats have elements of the ridiculous, like in the final board room scene where the main character asks for recognition, only this time also plays a goofy video of a sneezing panda bear cub.

That’s what makes for a good parody—enough similarity to parallel the original, but enough silliness to take things right over the top.  And this video nails it.  Watching the two trailers back to back is all the proof you need that these guys did their homework and paid attention to the details of their spoof.

Parody is a great choice if you’re contemplating a video style for your next viral masterpiece.  It offers something instantly recognizable and familiar to prospective audiences, which is usually enough to draw them in.  It also then allows you to skewer some piece of popular culture, which—if executed properly—can keep the viewer fully engaged and deliver them an entertaining experience worth sharing with their friends.

Not long ago, we created an application in Node.js, which uses MongoDB for persistence. Now we’re rewriting our Rails 2.3 application using MongoDB instead of MySQL. We’ve chosen Mongoid as our ORM.

While Mongoid provides a lot of powerful features, it is still very new and undergoing lots of changes and bug fixes. Here are a few things we’ve discovered this week.

• has_many_related, :stored_as => :array doesn’t work with Mongoid version less than 2 (so unless you want to be an early adopter of Rails 3, you’re out of luck.
• You can’t find embedded documents directly. You have to search from their parent. For instance, we wanted to find a Campaign with a given salesforce_id. As campaigns are embedded within Advertisers, we had to do “Advertiser.find(’campaign.salesforce_id’ => salesforce_id).campaigns.where(’salesforce_id’ => salesforce_id)”.

More to come..