Allusionist 3 Going Viral transcript

Hear this episode at theallusionist.org/viral.

HZ: This is The Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, smash the piggy bank of language to count the coins within. Coming up in today's show...

TOM PHILLIPS: You know, peoples' ovaries are not actually exploding because Benedict Cumberbatch has sort of winked at a camera.

HZ: Let's prepare ourselves with a little light word history. I was looking up the word "broad", as in "an immoral or ribald woman," and, as is often the case with slang words, its origins are annoyingly inconclusive. It might have been suggesting that the woman in question's pelvis was broad, or it might have been an abbreviation of "broadwife," that is, a woman who was away from her husband and thus available to other men. But here's a curious fact. Because "broad" was so insulting to women, in the 1960s the athletic event then-known as the "broad jump" was renamed the long jump. And yet slag heaps are still called "slag" heaps. Very inconsistent. On with the show.

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HZ: Remember when the word "viral" only meant something bad? From its ancient Proto-Indo-European root, "virus" turned up in many languages to mean "poison" or "slime". However, in my lifetime, the word "viral" has evolved from describing diseases, to things that would scupper your computer, to your office's lip dub of "Call Me Maybe" getting viewed 14 million times on YouTube since yesterday. It's hard to identify the exact person who coined this latter linguistic mutation, but by the mid-1990s people studying and writing about marketing were propagating the use of "viral" to mean "rapidly spreading popularity".

ROMAN MARS: Viral as a metaphor... I find it to be wrong.

HZ: There's Roman Mars, but not the Roman Mars familiar to you as the host of 99% Invisible, but the parallel universe Roman Mars who didn't go into audio, eventually to become our Radiotopia overlord, but instead stuck with his PhD in genetics.

ROMAN MARS: It's bad. It's like a bad metaphor in a lot of ways, because often the immediacy and efficacy of viruses means that they phase out even quicker, and so the desire for virality is weird, considering that really good viruses, you don't notice really good viruses. You know, like a lot of our DNA is of probably a viral origin, and we don't even know it.

HZ: Not being noticed would be the opposite of success for viral web content, and while many virals happen by accident, I doubt Cat Bin Woman anticipated millions of people would see a video of her crime of throwing away her cat into a rubbish bin. All over the internet, people are trying to make content go viral. And of course, one of the world's most successful generators of viral content is BuzzFeed. Every day, its staff members churn out hundreds of articles, lists, quizzes, and videos to be disseminated by social media users. And them doing so is probably just down to whether or not they're grabbed by the headline. So how do BuzzFeed capture someone's attention in just a few words? To find out, I met up with Tom Phillips, editorial director at BuzzFeed UK, and what happened next will blow your mind. 

TOM PHILLIPS: I mean, the thing with "blow your mind" is we don't tend to use "blow your mind" too much. There was this sort of headline style that was all over the internet for a long time recently, which was the "curiosity gap" headline. The stereotype of it is that, "This young boy with something slightly wrong with him was bullied, and then he decided to stand up himself. You won't believe what happened next!" That was a successful approach for many sites for a long time. I once, still one of my most read posts is one where I, the one time I tried out. I just wanted to see if it would work. By and large, we reject the curiosity gap approach. We're much more in favour of actually saying the thing that happened, and the headline being informative. Even if you don't actually click through to the story and read it all, the headline should actually inform you, rather than tease you or trick you or anything like that. 

HZ: Yes. Set you up for disappointment. 

TOM PHILLIPS: Exactly. 

HZ: When you believe what happened next. 

TOM PHILLIPS: Exactly. One thing we do, which I think people often confuse with that curiosity gap stuff, is we do use hyperbole quite a bit. Not so much on the news reporting side, because that doesn't really work with news values, but on the entertainment side, on the classic BuzzFeed, is like: "Beyoncé has just released a new song. I'm dead. I died. Right there, I'm dead now." And everybody in that audience knows about that, and understands that this is hyperbole, and that, you know, these people have not actually died, and that peoples' ovaries are not actually exploding because Benedict Cumberbatch has sort of winked at a camera. 

You can actually have some fun with ones that are a bit more sort of laid back. Like there was one post that did incredibly well, which was just about sort of the scale of the Solar System and the universe and things like that, and it was just sort of "26 pictures that will make you re-evaluate your place in the world," or something like that. It was weirdly sort of underplayed. Maybe a year, two years ago, like that would have been a, "Will blow your mind," kind of approach. 

HZ: The opposite of hyperbole is "litotes", the use of understatement for rhetorical effect. Whenever you say something like, for example, "Yeah, the view from the top of the Empire State Building is not bad," or you refer to a raging hotty as, "A bit of all right," congratulate yourself for your use of litotes, building on thousands of years of literary tradition. And maybe, if people are becoming desensitised to the hysterical pitch of headlines, litotes will be the next trend in viral content. 

TOM PHILLIPS: I think there's going to be a natural ebb and flow of this. People will start to associate sort of more hyperbolic headlines with the likelihood of disappointment, at the far end, and so understated can then sort of rise up, rise up, rise up. And then once sort of understated takes over, then there's a gap in the market. There's an ecological niche for people being hyperbolic again, and they'll get success, and it'll be a sort of a constant ebb and flow of hyperbole versus understatement. 

Somewhere we've got a spreadsheet of superlatives and words that are alternatives, so that we don't keep going to sort of like "jaw-dropping", "amazing", "the best X you will see today", that kind of thing, because while hyperbole is part of the language of a large part of our audience, and they understand that, it has to be inventive, it has to be creative, and it has to not be bullshit. It has to be something that everybody gets instinctively. And so you've got to keep playing with it. And if there is a glut of "amazing"s on the homepage, then it just, you look dumb. And so you do sort of very deliberately try to sort of play around with the language and just try things out. 

And that's the other thing about what we do, is that a lot of what we do is experimental. Basically, every post you'll go in like, "OK, we know that something like this does well, maybe if there's a little twist on it, if you phrase it slightly different, might it do better, will it do worse?" That sort of thing. We have a data team who are very, very good, and they actually sort of do deep analysis of, you know, what works, what doesn't, why people click, why people share. All that sort of thing. But a lot of these experiments we do are a lot more sort of ad-hoc and slightly loose, and you never quite know. You can never be entirely certain. It's like, you know, "Did that phrasing actually help it, or is it just once again the random fluctuations of the internet?" The internet will always surprise and horrify you, and there is a very common thing where you're just going like, "Internet, you liked this stuff last week, why don't you like it now?"

HZ: Because it's capricious, Tom. 

TOM PHILLIPS: Exactly. The internet is a capricious and wilful beast. 

HZ: How do you keep up with that?

TOM PHILLIPS: You feel your way through and start to get a sense of, "That kind of phrasing is popular right now, that kind of phrasing resonates with people." And then after a while it will stop resonating, and you move on to something else. 

HZ: The lifecycle of a particular word or phrase is hastened by its own success. The more it is shared, the more people see it, the more sites copy it, and the quicker everyone is sick of it. But some terms don't seem to burn out too quickly. 

TOM PHILLIPS: The word "actually". Just adding that to otherwise innocuous headlines seemed, for a while, I don't know if it's still happening, but seemed for a while definitely make them better. Like so, you know, like simple quizzes, like rather than sort of, "Which kind of Beyoncé are you?" - "Which kind of Beyoncé are you, actually?"

HZ: Because you've been labouring under a misapprehension for all this time.

TOM PHILLIPS: We will test out different headlines for pieces and sort of see if any of them do better. We had a series of posts recently on why living in a place "will ruin you for life", the whole point being that these are just very pretty pictures of a certain area and what it's like, you know, it will never be as good again living anywhere else. And "ruin your life" was really, really successful for a while, and then, until recently, it seems that "reasons you should never leave place" has kind of sort of come up behind it. 

HZ: Oh, a positive spin. 

TOM PHILLIPS: Yeah, exactly. I mean, it is interesting actually that the "ruin you for life" framing was successful, because we find the one thing that rarely works is any sort of level of sarcasm or irony, which is very interesting given that sarcasm and irony are like almost the default modes of discussion on many, many parts of the internet. But weirdly, it doesn't seem that using them in headlines makes them go particularly viral, which is an interesting thing to me. Like, we tried it many, many times, and it's always been the case that the straightforward, "This is what this is," headline will do better than the one that sort of turns it round, sort of inverts your expectations and does clever stuff with it, and is slightly distanced and a little bit arch. 

HZ: Maybe people, out of context, won't necessarily register the double meanings. 

TOM PHILLIPS: Exactly. I think this is the point, that when you're in the article you may get it, but a lot people won't come to the article because they think that it's... 

HZ: Mean. 

TOM PHILLIPS: Yeah, they think, or, alternatively, positive about something you should be positive about, you know, but they either won't go into it because they don't get it in the first place, or once they're out of it they will be worried about sharing it, because they think that other people will misinterpret them.

HZ: Why are people gripped by the urge to share this kind of content, rather than just reading it and moving on? 

TOM PHILLIPS: A lot of what we do is based around identity and how people express their identity. 

HZ: So you're providing people tools to set out their stall. 

TOM PHILLIPS: Exactly. And that can be, you know, from sort of the classic BuzzFeed posts, you know, "27 things that only people from Des Moines will understand"... 

HZ: What's with all the odd numbers, Tom? 

TOM PHILLIPS: We generally find that, for a start, non-rounds numbers do well. It seems we get into a terrible fuss if we're sort of creating a numbered list post and we end up on like sort of 20 things, because of like, "No, it's a round number." The odd numbers vs. even numbers thing, we have completely evidence-free discussions in the office about the idea that even numbers are better for nice things, and odd numbers are better for sort of weird, strange, or nasty things. Basically, people will sort of say, "Yeah, I did that one post that was odd-numbered, and that did fairly well, and then that post with an even number, that didn't do so well, so I'm going to invent an entire theory of mind to explain the random fluctuations of the internet." 

HZ: So even when you're an organisation dedicated to producing viral content, success is still largely trial and error. Something that seems to be fairly consistent, however, is the notion that audio does not go viral. Photos, written post, some videos, even videos with no visual interest go viral all the time. But aside from recordings of customers' frustrated calls to Comcast, audio alone rarely does. Well, Roman Mars takes exception to that, too. 

ROMAN MARS: I think it's dumb. Podcasts, that's really viral in the good sense. So like, it's about a decision, like of what type of virus you want to be. My type of virus is the one that you sign up for it once, and you have it forever. I'm like herpes, and they want us to be Ebola. And I don't get why you'd want to be Ebola. Ebola gets eradicated. Ebola doesn't spread far. Like I'd rather be herpes. 

HZ: Strong message to end on. 

[SLOW ACOUSTIC COVER OF "FRIDAY" BY REBECCA BLACK PLAYS]

HZ: Before we go, your randomly-selected word from the dictionary today is…

Bavardage. Noun. Rare noun, meaning idle gossip.

Try using it in an email today.

If you want, you can get in touch with me by seeking out @AllusionistShow on Facebook and Twitter. Thanks to all of you who've already been in contact since the show launched, especially Benjamin, who after the last episode about bras tweeted to tell me that his great-grandmother refused to wear a bra on the grounds that they were, "Evil, like the transistor radio." Perhaps she'd been picking up radio waves in her underwires?

This show resides at theallusionist.org. Thanks to Tom Phillips and Roman Mars. This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman, and there'll be another one along in two weeks' time.