{"id":13985,"date":"2017-10-06T16:37:00","date_gmt":"2017-10-06T14:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/?p=13985"},"modified":"2017-10-06T21:24:25","modified_gmt":"2017-10-06T19:24:25","slug":"how-to-get-people-to-share-serious-video-content","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/2017\/10\/how-to-get-people-to-share-serious-video-content.html","title":{"rendered":"How To Get People To Share Serious Video Content"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

At the recent Weekend Media Festival<\/a> in Rovinj, Croatia, I attended a\u00a0session by Jon Laurence<\/a>, Head of Digital at Channel 4 News on “How do you get people to care about serious news?”<\/p>\n

His entertaining and thought-provoking talk contained clear lessons for anybody interested in creating “viral” educational videos.<\/p>\n

A former journalist for The Telegraph, Jon moved to Channel 4 in 2015, and has helped raise the number of views of digital on social media from around five million views to over 250 million.<\/p>\n

His story is a refreshing antidote to the fable of younger generations being only interested in memes and short videos because, counter-intuitively,\u00a0the team\u00a0achieved big gains\u00a0by making\u00a0the stories\u00a0deeper, more serious, and more international.<\/p>\n

Channel 4 is a UK public TV channel, but unlike the better-known BBC, it\u2019s funded by advertising. It was specifically created for a younger audience, and to provide content that the more traditional BBC couldn\u2019t easily provide. The channel aims to highlight content that challenges the dominant perceptions, with\u00a0a diversity of opinions that don\u2019t always get represented in the rest of the media.<\/p>\n

What helps a video go viral?<\/h3>\n

The first three seconds.<\/strong> When somebody is scrolling down in Facebook, they\u2019re not necessarily looking for a video. They\u2019re in \u201cdiscovery mode\u201d, and you have the opportunity to show them things they didn\u2019t know that they were looking for. You have a \u201cthree second audition\u201d to grab their attention.\u00a0The video has to start with a striking image \u2014 even an \u201cemotional gut punch\u201d \u2014 and you have to use text to create the most engaging opening possible.<\/p>\n

Self-contained narratives.<\/strong> In order to get a wide viewership, it has to be more than a teaser or a trailer that tries to send people to another web site. For example, the video\u00a0below came\u00a0originally\u00a0from a much longer documentary, with a slightly different overall story. The content was readapted to create an experience for the social audience. It was made shorter, obviously, but it also avoided the most shocking scenes, because that\u2019s not the kind of thing you necessarily want to see in your news feed, and would made people hesitate to share it.<\/p>\n

“These radical Islamist preachers took their extremist message to the streets of London and got shut down again and again by ordinary Muslims.”<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

The importance of identity.<\/strong>\u00a0The Channel 4 videos\u00a0are\u00a0designed so that the act of sharing\u00a0it\u00a0helps show what kind of person you are. This allows people to indicate their values to others in a non-threatening way.<\/p>\n

For example, the video below explains\u00a0what’s happening\u00a0in Syria. It\u2019s an extremely complex conflict, and there\u2019s a lot of pressure in social media to make everything simple, to boil it down to \u201c5 basic facts about Syria”. But who wants to share content like that? It just makes\u00a0the person sharing it\u00a0look “basic”.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Channel 4 team instead created\u00a0\u201cWho is fighting whom?\u201d It has over four million views, not by dumbing\u00a0the subject down, but by going into depth in an efficient, engaging way.<\/p>\n

Design for mobile.<\/strong> The team’s research told them that the majority of videos are watched on mobile devices, and 85% are watching without sound. So\u00a0videos have\u00a0to be an audio-agnostic experience that can work on a small screen. The team views it once on a large screen, and then again on a\u00a0phone\u00a0with the sound off. It\u2019s essential to test by consuming the content as your audience will.<\/p>\n

Here’s an example of a video that was designed directly for mobile devices and social sharing with a square format. It’s the opposite of the high production values of the first video above, and done in a more humorous way.\u00a0But it still embodies values that people can share with others, and has over 900,000 views: “If the EU were 100 people”.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

The idea came from one of youngest members of\u00a0the team, as part of the regular team\u00a0discussions around\u00a0“what would\u00a0YOU like to cover?”.<\/p>\n

Make it relevant.<\/strong>\u00a0The team works hard to explain how\u00a0unpopular stories are relevant to the audience.\u00a0They constantly look for the universal value that lies behind the story, and why people should care.<\/p>\n

For example, Bishop Edward Daley<\/a> passed away last year. In Northern Ireland, on an infamous day known as Bloody Sunday, he had saved a lot of people by waiving a white handkerchief and bringing them to safety. But most of\u00a0Channel 4’s\u00a0audience wouldn\u2019t have heard of him, or necessarily know much about the events of that day.<\/p>\n

The first headline was something like \u201cBishop Edward Daley, Hero of Bloody Sunday, has died at 81\u201d. Jon\u00a0remembers\u00a0thinking: \u201cI commissioned this, and I wouldn’t even be interested in reading it!\u201d<\/p>\n

So instead the team\u00a0opened up the video with \u201cIt was a selfless act of bravery on one of Britain\u2019s darkest days\u201d<\/strong>. Everybody can identify with that kind of emotion, and everybody is proud to share that kind of sentiment.<\/p>\n

Another example was when Radovan Karad\u017ei\u0107<\/a> was found guilty of war crimes committed during the Balkan conflict. The team wanted to find a way to connect the events with a young audience who might not have heard anything about events such as Srebrenica<\/a>, so they started the video with the phrase with \u201cThese were the death camps on the edge of the European Union, and it\u2019s within living memory\u201d<\/strong>. The effect is to portray that this is \u201cclearly crucial knowledge you want to know about\u201d.<\/p>\n

And\u00a0they opened a video about Bangladesh with the phrase \u201cHow one teenager summoned the courage to leave her house after a horrific acid attack\u201d<\/strong>. In this case, the result was over fifteen million views, and the woman\u00a0received lots of donations to help restore her sight.<\/p>\n

Useful lessons\u00a0for all educational content<\/h3>\n

Few\u00a0of us have themes as important as Jon and his team to communicate. But the steps he’s outlined — explain\u00a0why people should watch\u00a0in ways that people can immediately understand,\u00a0think about the reasons why people would share it with others, optimize for mobile devices without sound, etc. — are relevant for anybody trying to share content through social media.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What does it take to get people to share serious content? Jon Laurence of Channel 4 Digital explains. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":13998,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[301,723,767,1313,987,1311,1310,1312],"class_list":["post-13985","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-best-practice","tag-croatia","tag-marketing","tag-news","tag-rovinj","tag-social-media","tag-socmed","tag-viral-videos","tag-weekend2017"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/jon-laurence.jpg?fit=600%2C558&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3X9RF-3Dz","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13985","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13985"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13985\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}