Step 1: Make your video. Make it weird, wild, and groundbreaking.

Step 2: Upload to You Tube.

Step 3: Sit back and watch it go viral. Globally.

Step 4: Cash in and stop reading this blog.

(Oh… and send us 10%)

Cynical? Nope. It has happened that way. It has happened that way for very very few people though (and they did not send us the 10%). It’s a great concept, but you will be hard pressed to find it really happening as described. If you have any doubts and believe the hype, get out your Mentos and soda and go for it!

From a business ROI point of view, You Tube is probably mostly useless content. If you can advertise around a lot if it, your perspective might be a little different. The company that made those blenders that ground up cell phones and golf balls and other stuff… what was their name again? Most people probably don’t remember and most people probably did not buy one of their blenders. However, they may have had a solid uptick in sales when capitalizing on You Tube like that was new and novel. Nowadays there are so many rip-offs and one-betters that using a product in a radical way is unlikely to get you too far on its own.

That hasn’t stopped a flurry of companies from promising to make your video viral on You Tube. Now that’s probably possible, but if they don’t get really really lucky, they will have to spend enormous (repeat enormous) amounts of cash and energy doing PR work of every kind, to “make” something go viral. And if that really can be bought, it would not be worth the investment.

Viral videos do happen. They happen when the timing is right, the content is right, and the public does their part. Mashable recently listed the Top 20 YouTube and Video Memes of All Time and if you look at them, there’s really only one that stands out as an effective, purpose made video, that arguably had huge ROI: “Obama Girl”. It may have helped elect a President and it probably put Barely Political on the map.

To think though, that a video can go viral and deliver a direct or indirect monetary result simply on its merits is a stretch, unless your threshold for measuring “viral” is really low. A recently reported statistic states that every minute, 10 hours of new video is uploaded to You Tube. That’s a huge amount of competition for your video to be found and then lit on fire.

The point here is that you can’t predict or control a virus. The touted bird flu pandemic has yet to happen. You can attempt to make something go viral and you can succeed, but the mere act of uploading a cool video is not the ticket, unless, like the bird flu scenario, the conditions are just right. It takes a great video, a strategy, a marketing plan, promotion, and lots of effort.

So, if you know of documented examples of purpose made viral videos that were simply posted to You Tube without the aforementioned support system, please tell us about it. And if you know about viral videos that went viral with the help of all the marketing mechanisms and had a measurable result, please share.