Friends School Lisburn has created a marvelous promotional video that’s gone viral this week. If the media and the web industry are to be believed the success of the video is down to the use of YouTube and Social Media. While these tools are instrumental in the spread of and distribution of the video they played an extremely small part in the success of the video entitled FSL Lipdub.
Giving credit to YouTube or Social Media as part of the success is the equivalent of giving TV the credit for the success of the recent Sherlock series on the BBC. The tele was simply the delivery channel. An essential element in reaching the audience but in the overall scheme of things, a small cog in a much bigger machine.
As digital marketers gain inspiration from this massive success and wish to use YouTube and Facebook to reach a wider audience I would ask them to consider what I suggest to be the real factors that lead to the success of this video, principally the creative marketing art of story telling.
I think the reason it went viral was the sheer number of people involved who would watch the video themselves and tell their friends and family about it.
Word of mouth remains the most powerful way for things to go viral, and in this case was gained through high participation levels.
What we can take away from that is that effective marketing is marketing which gets people to participate.
I enjoyed reading your blog post nonetheless
I feel that the reason for it’s success is:
- the uniqueness and charm of young people, in a school environment showing a very different side of school.
- the vision to adopt a popular film concept and have courage to put it out in the public domain.
- the skill of planning and clever use of time in filming without a budget.
- the enthusiastic pupils who took their roles seriously and the Head Teacher Mrs Dickson for agreeing to allow her pupils and school to be seen in a very different light.
- the skill and dedication of the production team, genius use of the camera, sound and creative editing.
- the social media channels which offered the perfect platform to distribute the video to it’s target audience; from Lisburn to Australia.
- Finally, the lip dub was made for the Friends School Open day, the objective to use it as a marketing tool wasn’t the plan. Now, I’m sure some marketeers are wondering how they could have the same success…well I think the FSL lip dub will be hard act to follow but using it as a case study will surely help companies to be brave and think outside the box!
Good luck – I’m away to make my own lip dub!
Julie Fitzsimmons
Niall, how do I share your blog!