Unruly's First Ever Social Video Film Festival

Next week Social Media Week kicks off in a number of cities across the globe, with an array of awesome events spanning talks, workshops, open studios and more! Unruly will be taking part as well, bringing to the table The First Ever Unruly Social Video Film Festival.

Unruly and Upload Cinema are teaming up to bring the best social videos of 2011 from the small screen to the big screen at Rich Mix cinema in Shoreditch. 

You are invited to join us for a fun-filled evening featuring Cocktails, the Festival Screening (with fresh popcorn), a raucous Panel Discussion and, of course, More Cocktails!

We’ll be screening a top-flight selection of branded and user-generated videos specially curated for Upload Cinema’s “Web Video Top 40” — which had its world premiere in Amsterdam on 29th January. This will be the exclusive opportunity for UK social video mavens to see these awesome videos all in one place!

The event is taking place on Wednesday 15th February from 7pm to 10:30 pm at Rich Mix cinema on Bethnal Green Road. To join us for this exciting event, please sign up on the Social Media Week website. For any questions you can email Unruly's Marketing and Events Co-ordinator, Emilie Giles, at em@unrulymedia.com.

Unruly To Sponsor ROFLcon III

Unruly are delighted to announce that we will be sponsoring the 3rd ROFLcon convention at MIT in May. The conference brings together internet celebrities, scholars and commentators to talk about the future of memetic web culture. 

Since the launch of Unruly's Viral Video Chart back in September 2006, we have watched as video sharing across Facebook, Twitter and the blogosphere has multiplied in size by 100x.

In this time we've seen Charlie bite fingers, witnessed double rainbows all the way across the sky and shouted NOPE! more than once. Now we get to meet these iconic YouTube stars. Check out the guest list here, it is as epic as Epic Beard Man.

Online culture is at the heart of social video, so we are very excited to attend and sponsor ROFLcon III. 

We hope you can all come join us there. Registration is open and the guest list is epic.

Watch this space for more details of our presence at the event and coverage during it.

Conference Recap: Social Data - The New Currency

Unruly's Group Head of International Operations, Scarlett De Courcier (@bohemiacademia) recently attended WOMMA's Espresso event, Social Data: The New Currency. The event explored how through social technologies brands can explore what consumers really want, looking beyond the data.

Last Thursday, I attended the first WOMMA Espresso event at Cubaca in London. The speaker was Hakan Thyr from Bazaarvoice, discussing the kinds of reviews people are leaving on consumer-related sites and the lessons brands can take from the feedback.

Bazaarvoice have worked with more than 1,000 brands since starting up in 2005. Their platform is threefold, offering ratings & reviews, questions & answers, and stories. Clients will ask Bazaarvoice to create a survey or questionnaire for their site, which users then fill in to give feedback around a product, event or brand overall.

One of the main points gleaned from their Conversation Index study of Q3 2011 was that timing really is everything. Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the USA were peak times for consumer review generation, with Cyber Monday growing by 42% from 2010.

Mobile browsing is also having an impact on customer reviews, with the level of traffic from mobile devices increasing by 12% in the past year. Purchases from mobiles and smartphones have also increased, tripling over 2011. Interestingly, whilst August is traditionally a quieter time for both retail and online media, iPad usage actually soars in this period, perhaps indicating that people take their tablet devices on holiday with them to while away the long hours on the beach!

Brands also need to be aware of the differing needs of the various kinds of consumers they engage with; new customers tend to be looking for simple solutions to their immediate issues, whereas those who have been with a brand for twenty or more years focus more on courtesy and a helpful attitude.

Shipping problems are also important to consider; even if you have no ultimate control over them, they can really sink your product ratings. It’s important therefore to make sure you’ve got good visibility over who’s delivering what, and when; that way, you can answer customer queries quickly and deal with any shipping issues that might arise.

Lastly, Generation Y showed an interesting trend in terms of reviews: they were the only group who were more likely to be influenced by reviews left by strangers rather than by friends and family. This indicates a fundamental shift in where certain consumers look for product recommendations, and shows that positive online reviews are crucial for a product to break into the lucrative Gen-Y market.

Media Partners Read On!

As part of Unruly's ongoing effort to maintain the highest standards of accountability and transparency in social video advertising, we mailed all our media partners today in order to clarify our requirements for disclosure.

In case anyone missed or overlooked the email, here's the text:

Dear Unruly Partner,

Please read this email carefully because you need to make sure that you’re religiously following Unruly's guidelines and terms of service.

http://www.unrulymedia.com/publisher-terms/

At Unruly, we’re really proud of the amazing sites, blogs, apps and games we work with, whether it’s a mini-media empire like Mashable, fantastic niche titles and communities like Skiddmark and BuzzFeed, or more personal but awesome blogs such as The Green Familia and jasonslater.co.uk.

When we’re distributing great content from brands we need to make sure that this is done in a way that is completely transparent, honest, and ethical. This is not about enforcing minimums, it’s about being as transparent, honest, and ethical as possible. About being whiter than white.

First, let’s talk about links. Unruly’s video player typically links to the advertiser’s site, YouTube channel or Facebook page. It does this in a totally safe way (using nofollow, redirects, and JavaScript embedding) that does not transfer PageRank from your site to the advertiser’s site.

This is really important. Be very, very careful if you add any of your own links. If you want to link to the advertiser’s site in an article, post, or tweet, only use the redirect links that we provide you that are also safe. If you don’t do this, you may be in breach of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines (Google guidelines). If you’re not sure, just don’t link. The video player links so you don’t have to!

Second, let’s talk about disclosure. Unruly’s video player always has a disclosure underneath it making it totally clear that the video is sponsored. This is fine if you just embed the video in a column or area reserved for commercial content. However, if you embed the video in a blog post, you should always put the phrase ‘Sponsored Video’ as the first two words of the title of your post. If you link to a page containing the video in a tweet or status update, you should mark it #ad. It doesn’t matter that you’re not being paid to tweet or post the video - Because you stand to benefit commercially every time someone watches the video on your site or app, you need to make sure you disclose this clearly.

We have been working over the past few days to strengthen our internal audit methods and processes. We hope this is helpful. Think of us as a second pair of eyes, helping you stay true to your readers and to your principles!

As a consequence, some of you may start to receive notices from us over the next few months if our audit procedures discover something that needs to be brought to your attention.  We hope you will review these notices and make any changes that are necessary.

We’re really proud at Unruly to be working with such a great family of bloggers, app developers, film makers, website owners and game developers. We’ll do everything we can to improve our service, to bring you more videos, to earn you more money, and to ensure that, together, we hold ourselves to the highest standards.

Best Regards,


Steve Dorey

Media Director

What's Next For Social Video 2012

Original article appeared on EConsultancy's blog on January 18, 2012

There is no doubt that 2011 has been a record-breaking year for social video. 

It was the year Volkswagen’s ‘The Force’ ad stormed the SuperBowl to become the most shared ad of all time in just six days, jumping from 100,000 to 1m views in just a few hours. 

It was the year that Charlie Sheen, thanks to some hilarious interviews, gained 1m followers in 25 hours and 17 minutes on Twitter, earning himself a Guinness World Record for the fastest person to a million followers. 

It was also the year that saw online beat TV to the number one ad spend spot for the first time.

With social video being included as an ad format in its own right, ad spend continued to follow the 100% growth year on year trend that started in 2008. 

So what does 2012 hold for online video?  

Here are some predictions from our 'What's next for social video?' insight report...

1. Video culture: what will people be watching?

Memes will spring from unexpected places throughout 2012 as they have for years but, as always, momentous events will provide a springboard for meme culture. 

The US Election and the Olympics will be meme playgrounds, and memes are also likely to spring from End of the World predictions as December 21 approaches: it’s the end of a 5,125-year-long cycle in the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar which has been the centre of speculation in certain circles. 

Brands will be anticipating the memes, themes and Olympian dreams of 2012, creating video content around key events, and epic ads that use storytelling to engage and build long-term connections with audiences, as with the Heineken content of 2011. 

People will be creating and watching more user/community-funded films in 2012, with companies like Kickstarter providing independent film makers with access to funding, and video tools from YouTube and others boosting the quality of user generated content.

Brands will do more to encourage audience participation and interaction both by using their audiences to create content via competitions, and by introducing interactive functionality alongside their video content.

Alongside epic, high quality content, fast/sticky/funny content will persist in video, and extend via GIFs.

Video and images are the key components of meme propagation online and simple GIFs are likely to become fancier and spread more readily as a midpoint between video and images.

GIFs behave as video shorthand and will become a more common form of expression in 2012 thanks to free downloadable and web-based programmes for GIF creation and opportunities to post GIFs on Tumblr, Google+ and new GIF sites.

2. Device proliferation: where will people be watching?

While people will continue to consume social video on PC & desktop computers, and while Connected TVs will gain traction, significant and increasing numbers of people will be watching social video on phone and tablet mobile devices.

Mobile is the fastest growing information & communications technology ever seen (Figure 1) and mobile penetration will continue to grow in 2012.

Figure 1

Source: ITU World Telecommunication / ICT Indicators database. *2011 data is estimated.

Developed economies

Cross-platform consumption of video content will become the norm, and since sharing is intuitive on mobile devices, cross platform social video will reach the mainstream. 

A ‘best available device’ culture will emerge, which sees users demanding the content they want, when they want it, on the best screen they happen to have to hand at that moment.  

This is already happening, and providers of content by subscription, from the Financial Times to AppleTV are selling cross-platform subscriptions to allow content to be pulled from the cloud onto multiple devices. 

This culture is likely to lead to the introduction of a ‘Continuous Client’, a term coined by Joshua Topolsky of Engadget in 2010, which describes full synchronicity between multiple devices so that the work done on a phone, tablet or PC follows a user around as they switch to other devices.

As Topolsky says: "your devices (and their clients) should talk to each other so that you can placeshift your session from screen to screen".

Figure 2 shows that ad campaigns that have been run across two platforms perform better than those that have been run across a single platform: with data like this and users consuming media across multiple devices, brands will increase their cross platform ad spends significantly in 2012.

As brand budgets follow the audiences to mobile, blending of brand video delivery across online, mobile and TV platforms will become commonplace.

Figure 2

Nielsen Cross Platform Behaviour, September 2011

Brands will also start embracing multi-screen consumption, engaging with the companion screen to create content which is designed to complement a TV-type viewing experience.

Users are already using the companion screen while watching TV, and in 2012 more brands, particularly broadcasters, will come out with companion content designed for smartphones and tablets.

Now that smartphones increasingly have 3D and Augmented Reality (AR) delivery capabilities built in, there will be a jump in the amount of commercially produced 3D and AR content in 2012, especially as 3DTV proliferation increases.

Entertainment and top FMCG brands are likely to lead this charge. Juniper Research predicts that AR mobile revenues will jump from $2m in 2010 to $1.5bn in 2015. 

As new smartphones and tablets hit the market with increasingly diverse features, from advanced camera technologies to temperature sensors and barometers, new features are likely to become a springboard for innovations from native application developers.  

Developing and supporting native applications for multiple devices and operating systems is time consuming and expensive. Brands have a need for quality HTML5 functionality which allows them to support features cross platform.

Emerging economies

Figure 3

Source: ITU World Telecommunication / ICT indicators database. Developed / developing country classifications are based on the UN M49. *2011 data is estimated.

Figure 3 shows that emerging markets are seeing a much faster and wider adoption of mobile devices than of internet connected desktop and laptop devices, and that increasing mobile subscriptions are impacting the growth of web use(slightly but significantly) in those markets.

These trends result from the ability to access connectivity at a much lower cost via mobile devices. For example, Aakash, a tablet device launched in India, is being sold to students at the subsidised price of $35, and are likely to continue in emerging economies over the coming years.

Affordable mobile technology is becoming a work platform and a revenue generator for people in emerging economies. 

For global advertisers, this means new markets are opening up: direct-to-consumer channels are becoming available in territories previously difficult to reach, such as India and Africa. 

India’s current internet penetration stands at 6.6% of the population but is predicted to reach 29.5%, with the number of Indian smartphones set to top 450, by 2015 .

3. Social platforms: how will people be sharing?

As well as the ‘Big Four’ social platforms of 2012 (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google+) social gaming environments will play a larger role in video sharing, as will the already powerful presences of region specific social platforms such as RenRen in China and VKontakte in Russia.

The advent of social video viewing platforms like Shelby.tv and VHX may begin to change the way people discover, consume and share social video content.

These platforms are designed to turn Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr into TV channels, where you can discover and watch all of the videos your friends are sharing and talking about in real time.

They facilitate a dedicated social video experience, and may be more widely used in 2012.

Facebook

Facebook is already becoming a gatekeeper, having introduced an Advertiser Whitelist, Facebook Credits, and HTTPS support requirements in 2011, and they will continue to control third party access, introducing more third party requirements in 2012 and beyond. 

On Facebook for the mobile web or iPad, if you tap on a story that a friend has posted in your newsfeed relating to an app, Facebook will fast-app-switch you over to the app if you already have it, or it will deep link you to the app store to download the app if not.

This functionality tries to be device-appropriate: if you’re viewing from an Android device, it will direct you to the Android app if possible.

HTML5 apps are not mainstream, so it’s essential for Facebook to fully support native applications. However, the current solution takes users out of the site and out of Facebook’s control, so it is unlikely to be a long term fix.

The leaked Project Spartan, a Facebook developer platform designed for mobile apps in HTML5, may be released in 2012 as a longer term play from the company as HTML5 becomes more developed and functional. 

Twitter

Twitter will do more with 'Big Data' in 2012. It introduced link shortening in June 2011, meaning that it can now wrap all links shared in Twitter in the ‘t.co’ format to capture data around how popular links are.

Twitter owns a lot of data around the number of clicks in a given time period, and may use this real-time link tracking to introduce real-time targeted ads.

YouTube

YouTube has introduced video tools to make video editing easier for users, which are likely to increase the quality of the video content on the site.

The trend towards live content and on-demand services on YouTube will continue as Connected TV and TV on Demand blur the lines between TV and online.  

Also, there are likely to be more pay-per-view partnerships between YouTube and broadcasters. For example, the Ultimate Fighting Championship made all of the main card fights from UFC 135 available live for fans in the U.S. on the UFC YouTube channel for $44.99.

Google+

Google+ is similar to Twitter and Facebook in many respects, but Hangouts are a differentiator.

Hangouts have the potential to become a hub for real-time socialised co-viewing, perhaps particularly around video classes, and Google+ may increase focus on social viewing via hangouts in 2012.

Social gaming

Social gaming will become even more mainstream in 2012. In the early days of social gaming, the common perception of social gamers was that they were all teens and tweens.  

A little later, with the rise of Facebook games, the average social gamer was a 43-year-old woman, and by 2011, the largest demographic was 25-34 males, with females not far behind (Figure 4).

By 2012, there will be 68.7m social gamers in the US , and already 92% of smartphone owners play mobile games weekly. 

Within social gaming, value exchange advertising will be huge. Value exchange allows brands to reward users for engaging with their content, presenting a positive experience for users at the time that they choose to interact, and freeing them from annoying ‘ads’ during gameplay.

Engaging with users when they are gaming allows advertisers to reach users in their downtime when they have time to engage with content: sharing it, clicking through for more information and commenting on it if they find it interesting.

Figure 4              Figure 5

Popcap Research, September 2011                                                 Mashable, March 2011

Local social platforms

While the Middle East and North Africa will be loyal to Facebook and YouTube, J-BRIC (Japan, Brazil, Russia, India and China) will continue to engage increasingly with local video platforms and social networks, including Mixi in Japan, VKontakte in Russia, and Orkut in Brazil and India.

China’s use of social platforms is increasing and the most popular platforms tend to be homegrown, largely because Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Google+ and many other platforms are banned in China.

Youku is the top Chinese video sharing site, Sina runs the biggest blog and microblog community, and China’s various social networks are illustrated in Figure 5.

Global brands will have to start tailoring social plans to make use of these international social platforms, in order to have success around the world.

4. Brands and video in 2012

Social video is emerging as the format of choice for planners and strategists with an eye on the long game.

The honeymoon for the 15-second pre-roll ad is coming to an end as advertisers demand better execution and cut-through and move budgets from push formats towards pull solutions; even pre-roll is starting to morph into an interactive multi-choice medium.

The pioneering brands of 2012 will be looking to brands that have created memes (like Old Spice with “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like”), have ridden memes very successfully (like Volkswagen with “The Force”), or have created Epic Ad content that uses storytelling to engage audiences (like Heineken with “The Entrance”) and strive to create similarly resonant content: online video creatives will see higher production and distribution budgets.

As brands spend more time and money on social video, the analytics and insight they need to see around this content will become more and more important. 

Brands will be looking for insight into exactly who is watching and sharing their videos, including demographics, real time brand uplift metrics; and benchmarking by category.

Understanding the true sentiment behind comments at scale will also become increasingly important for advertisers as more users engage and interact with branded content. 

Social video bridges the gap between content consumption and ad spend.

Social video campaigns generated 820m views in 2009, 2.7bn views in 2010, and over 8bn views in 2011. We are likely to see the number of views delivered from social video campaigns more than double again in 2012. 

Unruly Secures $25M in Funding from Leading Technology Investors

Today we announced that we've secured $25M in first round private funding - the largest ever for a private company in the social video space.  The announcement has already been picked up by several news outlets, including: Econsultancy, All Voices, Frenchweb, AltAssets, VentureBeat.

Below is the email that Unruly CEO and Co-Founder Scott Button sent to all Unrulies this morning:

"So after a few late nights, too much coffee, and a fair amount of pizza we finally closed our funding round. The size of the round is $25m. 

"That's considerably more than we originally anticipated raising, as we received lots of offers from top-tier VC firms, and the round itself was oversubscribed. It's a series A, which just means that it's the first round of institutional capital that we've taken. The investors are Amadeus Capital, Van den Ende and Deitmers, and the Business Growth Fund. Together, they now hold a minority stake in Unruly. "A bit about the funds and why we chose them. Amadeus is a top class, highly tech-orientated VC firm, with a fabulous UK tech heritage.

"Hermann Hauser, one of the co-founders of Amadeus, co-founded Acorn Computers, helped design the BBC Micro, and co-founded the Olivetti Research Lab at Cambridge. (I wrote some of my first code on a BBC Micro. My mum was a teacher and she used to borrow the machine in the holidays because we couldn't afford to buy one. No fear: I did not pursue this vocation!) Van den Ende and Deitmers, by contrast, is a Dutch firm founded by Joop van den Ende - he's the Ende of Endemol! -  and Hubert Deitmers, another of Endemol's board directors, so they have a ton of expertise around content and media and they complement Amadeus really well.

"The Business Growth Fund is a brand new GBP 2.5 billion fund whose mission is to help build the next generation of world-class UK companies. "This is a mission that we share and applaud and we're very happy to be one of their first investments. All of the firms were very excited about Unruly, about the social video space, and about the prospect of building a European tech company that can take on the world and win, so we're very glad to be welcoming them to team Unruly.

"We'll be holding a soiree over the next week or two, where you can meet people from all the firms and find out a bit more about them.

"As we've said all along, Unruly doesn't need to raise capital. We're growing tremendously fast. We turned over more revenue last quarter than we did in the whole of the previous year and are fast approaching an annual revenue runrate of $50m. And we've been profitable for the last three years.

"But this is about ambition, speed and scale. The extra capital will enable us to aggressively accelerate our international expansion. We're set on becoming the dominant player in every major advertising territory within the next two years and this will help us get there. We'll do this with style, we'll do it with a sense of fun, and we'll do it in a human way that doesn't have everyone chained to their desks 24/7 but we're not about to go soft!

"We intend to retain all the rigour and discipline that got us this point without needing external capital. It's important that we maintain margins, that we continue to improve our management of working capital, and that we continue to improve the revenue efficiency (revenue per employee) of the business. Why? Because this is the stuff that, allied to fast revenue-growth, will create lots of value at an exit.

"We will invest heavily where we think there is a solid business case, but we are not, for instance, going to start chucking money at new hires to solve problems that would be better solved through improved product design or better business process. We will invest in core product - we will be hiring more engineers and more technical staff to buffer the engineering team. We will also be investing in non-revenue-generating support functions such as IT, HR, and finance, because we can't scale the company, can't jump from 100 staff to 200 staff over the next 12 months, without significantly upgrading those functions and bringing in more awesome people.

"If there's any area you think we should be investing in, any issues we should be addressing, but aren't, come and talk to me. Walk over to my desk.

"Buttonhole me in the kitchen. Tell me to come and grab a sandwich with you at lunchtime. We have a lot to do and I expect everyone, at all levels, to be thinking about how we can do stuff better. Unruly is designed to be a meritocracy from top to bottom, a place where the quality of ideas and outcomes always trumps hierarchy, so don't be afraid to contribute and to make yourself heard. "Here's to 2012 and a huge Unruly future!"

Unruly IAB Video Engage Presentation

Last week Unruly's Media Director, Steve Dorey and Business Development Manager, Cat Jones (@catrjones) presented at the IAB's Video Engage conference. They explored what 2011 has brought us with regards to social video, and what we can expect from 2012. You can view their presentation below:

Unruly IAB Video Engage

Here is some supporting information which Cat and Steve mentioned in their presentation:

• 'Continuous Client' is a term coined by engadget; more information can be found here
• UKOM stats from June 2011 show gaming making up 10% of the time spent on PCs, according to the IAB Online Adspend Study
• There are approximately 118.5MM social gamers in the US and UK combined, according to Popcap Research, 2011

 For a full review of Video Engage, please check out the IAB's website.

Unruly Wins Business Of The Year And Outstanding Business Achievement At Chambers Of Commerce Awards Night

Unruly CEO Scott Button (second from left) and fellow Unrulies are given the award for Business of the Year

Unruly's incredible winning streak continued last night, as we scooped a hat-trick of gongs at the National Chambers of Commerce Awards, including Outstanding Business Achievement of the Year and UK Business of the Year.

Unruly also won the Finding New International Markets accolade at the prestigious event, held at the Grand Connaught Rooms yesterday.

It is the eighth award we have won in the last month-and-a-half, a fitting end to what has been an incredible year for Unruly.

Other honours picked up during October and November include Growth Strategy of the Year at the National Business Awards, Digital Innovator of the Year (for CEO Scott Button) and Female Entrepreneur of the Year (for COO Sarah Wood).

Book Review: Epic Win for Anonymous

Holly Clarke (@HollyClarke) reviews Cole Stryker’s Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4Chan’s Army Conquered the Web

The first two rules of 4chan are the same as the first two rules of Fight Club - and Cole Stryker’s book breaks both of them.

Epic Win for Anonymous could be wrongly thought of as a catalogue of the actions of the hacking culture commonly associated with the message board 4chan, grouped under the name 'Anonymous'.

It actually aims to shed light on the history of the net ideologies surrounding the forum and how this has grown and evolved into an epic gene pool of culture and anonymous melting pot of ideas.

4chan's random board /b/ can be considered the daddy of meme culture, spawning everything from lolcats to Rebecca Black, from Rickrolls to Rage Comics. The book explains the origins of memetics and how Richard Dawkins's concept of the meme became synonymous with "bits of pop culture that are considered 'from the Internet'".

Styker offers up an introduction to what is a very complex and esoteric subject in an approachable and humorous manner that even a web culture n00b can enjoy.

Although the book covers many areas that would make a seasoned /b/tard facepalm, it does shed new light into the history of this phenomenon with original interviews, smart analogies and fresh insight (I particularly like the parallels drawn between chan culture and a scene from the movie Office Space).

Unruly created and manages the ViralVideoChart, so our roots stem from this memetic, viral culture. Social video is the matured concept of virility. It taps into the reason why we share and talk about content, optimising it for a brand's KPIs, whether they are awareness, attention, action or advocacy.

We also occasionally see social videos campaigns which nod to meme culture (Double Rainbow, Chuck Testa, Smart Water to name a few), so charting the history and contextual relevance of memetic ideologies is a passion at the heart of the business. Plus we enjoy the lolz.

The book also takes on the wider anthropological and political issues inherent in this wild west of the internet, aiming to understand where such behaviours stem from and what might become of them in the future.

It is not for the faint-hearted and comes with a warning in the prologue, as much of the content posted to 4chan is classed as NSFW. Be careful, here /b/ dragons. However, this is a must read for anyone who wishes to gain insight into meme culture and the origins of the 'Internet hate machine'.

Buy on Amazon

Make 'Em Laugh: New Scientific Research Identifies What Makes People Share Videos on Web

How do you know when you have a social video hit on your hands?

After all, creating a successful video campaign that will engage your customers is as tricky as writing a hit song.

You may think your ad has what it takes to attract hundreds of thousands of shares, but up to now trying to predict the next Old Spice Guy, Evian Roller Babies or The Force is more of an art than a science. After all, not all everybody looks great in just a white towel and a smile.

However, fascinating new research carried out by a university in Australia hopes to change all that.

The study, led by Dr Karen Nelson-Field, Dr Erica Riebe and Dr Kellie Newstead at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, based in the University of South Australia, has identified the emotions that are the most likely to trigger sharing across the social web.

The key findings were as follows:

• While most videos are either amusing or boring, they are not the most shared - This explains why most videos do not attract that many shares
• Videos that evoke marked physiological responses (laughter, anger, crying, shock) are the most likely to be shared – So it's content that makes us laugh or cry, not just smile of frown, that triggers sharing 
• In general, videos that evoke positive emotions (exhilaration, hilarity, astonishment, happiness, inspiration) are more likely to be shared than those that evoke negative emotions (anger, disgust, sadness, shock, frustration)

So had did they come up with the data? Well, the study group took 400 user-generated videos and worked out the average number of daily shares each clip generated on Facebook (source: Facediggs).

They then asked 14 independent people to watch a sub-set of the sample and indicate the emotions they personally felt from a list of 16 potential emotional responses.

These were: astonishment, exhilaration, inspiration, hilarity, surprise, happiness, calmness, amusement, shock, anger, frustration, disgust, discomfort, sadness, boredom and irritation. Each video was ‘coded’ twice to lessen the impact of subjectivity.

They then allocated each emotion an average number of daily shares, with hilarity and anger coming top with 6,392 and 5,293 respectively, and boredom (622) unsurprisingly finishing bottom.

Look at the table below for the full results:

But what does this all mean for brands? Well, certainly there is a lot in this report to be learned about the kind of content brands should be creating to improve their chances of social video success.

The first lesson is that it seems laughter is not only the best medicine, but also the best way to get someone to share your content, with hilarity easily the most likely emotion to trigger sharing activity.

As the report states: "An advertiser might be on safe ground to aim for hilarity but be willing to accept happiness or amusement, particularly if it results in a better branded video."

The second is something we have been saying at Unruly for a long time: namely, the stronger the emotion, the more likely it will get shared. So creatives should pick the emotional response they are aiming for, then crank it up to 11, Spinal Tap style.

However, be careful when picking anger as your trigger. Sure, people are more likely to share your video, but it runs the dual risk of being merely irritating and tough to create in a way that is relevant to your brand. Being positive is a much safer bet.

The shock tactics employed by most PSAs these days also needs re-examining looking at these results. Shock managed an average of only 2,865 shares a day.

The fact the research focused purely on UGC, thereby excluding a number of 'confounding factors' - as the report calls them - such as offline campaign expenditure, prior product usage and video seeding, is also crucial.  

However, a new study, which will look purely at branded video content, is already being planned early next year, in which the group plans to use the same measuring tool. 

But there are still some problems with the data, notably the subjectivity of the emotional responses. After all, we do not all respond to content in the same way. Something one person may find hilarious, another may find disgusting, or, even worse, boring.

For example, John Lewis's controversial Christmas ad has attracted a wide range of emotions, and not all good. Dr Nelson-Field, however, insists the data is robust. 

She said: "Yes, one half of the UK cried (a positive cry, so could be inspiration) at the John Lewis ad, while the other probably still found it positive, but low arousal (i.e. happiness or calmness).

"However, when you add an additional 13-14 emotions in (so 16 to choose from in total), the mathematical probability of two coders coding the same emotion by pure chance becomes very low (exactly 0.3%) - given our inter-coder agreement was noted at close to 90%, our assessment of reliability is empirically robust."