Bournemouth Students Support Comic Relief
Guest posting – Comic Relief is an annual fundraising event in the UK based on humour. Taking this event as a newsworthy hook, nine Bournemouth University PR students took on the challenge to create a fun video as part of the interactive media unit of their degree.
Bournemouth students & staff dance to the official Comic Relief single, ‘Just Can’t Get Enough’ by The Saturdays
The aim of the video was also to drive traffic to the Comic Relief donation page, drive traffic to the Centre for Excellence in Media Practice (CEMP) site, raise awareness of Comic Relief and the University’s corresponding fundraising activities.
The making of
The making of the video was simple. Take nine outgoing youngsters with bundles of PR charm to convince unsuspecting, passing staff and students to give up a few minutes of their time to get involved and ‘do something funny for money’. Add a high quality digital camera mounted on a tripod to capture still images of random actions from chefs waving to a Wildcat cheerleader’s Red Nose Day cheer by said staff and students – and all with red noses on. The still images were put to the official Comic Relief single ‘Just Can’t Get Enough‘ by The Saturdays and sequenced into a stop motion animation using Final Cut Pro.
The strategy
Once the video was edited together, the seeding could begin. The video was posted to Youtube and linked to from a blog on the CEMP site thanking the participants and listing them by name. The CEMP link was then distributed via email to all participants, whose email addresses were captured at the time of filming, to thank them for participation and to encourage the virality of the content.
The initial simplistic strategy was to paste the CEMP link to Facebook and Twitter statuses to utilise the viral creators’ online networks and social capital and thus encourage community members to take a look at the content. Ultimately the aim was for the content to then be passed on to friends of friends, hence taking it viral. A Bournemouth University does Comic Relief group was set up on Facebook to specifically monitor video related comments outside of Youtube, and the video link was sent to existing Facebook Comic Relief groups to tap in to the interest in the event and encourage more views.
In addition to this the CEMP content was shared using the video creators’ existing participation in social networks including LinkedIn news, Google Bookmarks, digitalspy forums, StumbleUpon and Digg.
For the same reason, the video was also uploaded to third party sites including Mixx, the PR specific social network PROpenMic.org, funny clips blog site LOL Factory, and Dutch video hosting site Zie.nl. The uploading of the content to Zie.nl utilised the online contacts of Dutch colleague and interactive media enthusiast Daan Jansonius.
Bournemouth University Student’s Union uploaded the video to their Red Nose Day minisite, and agreed to send the link out in all communications relating to the fundraising event. This strategy aimed to give credibility to the video. The online activity was supported by traditional PR which involved the send out of the video link with a short broadcast-friendly press release to local media and key media contacts.
Analysis
The seeding strategy started immediately to try and ensure that the video secured enough hits so that it appealed to offline media and became a more mainstream news story with the local angle of Bournemouth University students doing something “funny for money”. The obvious validation of third party broadcast endorsement would have been invaluable. The ultimate, ambitious aim of the team, was to try and get the viral broadcast on the main Comic Relief telethon on Friday 13th March.
The ‘Bournemouth University Students support Comic Relief 2009‘ video went live on YouTube at 7.30pm on Monday 2nd March. The initial seeding strategy re-directed user back to Centre Of Excellence in Media Practice website at Bournemouth University, where the blog post explaining the concept was hosted. The initial posting of the blog saw a demonstrable rise in traffic to the CEMP site on Google analytics, through the initial seeding throughout Web 2.0. The initial post on CEMP elicited 40 comments from visitors to the blog post with 24 being unequivocally positive, one comment offered constructive critique which was subsequently discussed in the thread.
The inital blogposting caused a demonstrable rise in traffic to the CEMP site, see in full screen mode
At the time of writing, it had received 2,880 hits on YouTube with 30 text comments all of which were positive. The “Bournemouth University does Comic Relief” Facebook group has 104 members. The “do something funny for money page” that was set up by BAPR students had raised £18 for Comic Relief. On Zie, the video has been viewed 7,686 times and has been given a “thumbs up” 41 times. The video was placed on the homepages of both LOL Factory and PR Open Mic. The video has been “dugg” 11 times on Digg. In the run-up to actual Comic Relief day, participants in the viral’s creation have resolved to re-double their efforts to drive traffic to the video and intensify efforts to raise offline awareness. This will be done through assisting Comic Relief promotional activity around the university and re-focusing on targeting mainstream, traditional media.
The breakdown from YouTube insight, see in full screen mode
Results
- Youtube – 2,880 hits with 30 text comments
- Zie.nl – 5,828 views 41 ‘thumbs up’
- Facebook – 104 group members
- Digg – 11 diggs
- PROpenMic – 6 views
- MetaCafe – 197 views
- Yahoo Video – 56 views
- Myspace – 2 views
Conclusion
In summary the video tried to capitalise on the timeliness of Comic Relief as a national fundraising event to give newsworthy value and a purpose to the video. Upon reflection, however, it would seem that the video failed to capture the attention of a wide audience, and this could be attributed to the noise and clutter of Comic Relief activity. This year Comic Relief used social media to a greater extent and this means that our attempts could be lost within the official content.
The video clearly lacked something that would have made it worthy of being passed on amongst friends, to make it go viral. The collation of email addresses of the participation was a direct effort to stimulate virality, however this video only served to re-iterate the difficulties in creating a successful meaningful message that retains sufficient virality.
Comic Relief and Red Nose Day 2009 beat its previous 2007 record by raising over £57 million for good causes.
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Great post! Thanks for the insights!
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