Famous People Online — And What We Can Learn From Them

As online mar­keters in these days, we can’t help but avoid the topic of social media. That is what most peo­ple are using for them­selves and their busi­ness. Face­book, Twit­ter, Youtube are all excel­lent ways to mar­ket your prod­ucts, ser­vices, or what­ever. Mil­lions of peo­ple log onto these social sites every day. It’s def­i­nitely a big thing right now .

But some peo­ple are famous online that are not mar­keters (for the most part). It’s some of these peo­ple I’m inter­ested in look­ing at today. They have uti­lized the power of social media (mainly videos) and have become famous one way or another. Some are just pop­u­lar within cer­tain cir­cles and oth­ers have even gone on to being on tv or sell­ing albums. All thanks to the viral nature of the inter­net and social media. So let’s look at a few of them. In no par­tic­u­lar order:

Beware: some con­tent is not intended for chil­dren. Just so you know, if you decide to check out some of the links.

Angry Video Game Nerd
Although his site cov­ers things such as movies, James Rolfe is bet­ter known for his videos; The Angry Video Game Nerd. It shows clad up in a nerdy out­fit play­ing old games from nes, sega gen­e­sis and the like. The thing that makes him stand out are his reviews of video games are usu­ally of bad video games. And his lan­guage is extremely col­or­ful and com­i­cal. He basi­cally picks these games apart and talks about how they are so bad.

AVGN became famous shortly after he was able to start upload­ing videos to Youtube and shortly after on Gametrailers.com. He more or less has a cult fol­low­ing and even sells AVGN mer­chan­dise, includ­ing shirts and DVDs of his videos.

Brooke Bro­dack (aka Brook­ers)
A prime exam­ple of hav­ing unique and what some might say crazy, videos on youtube can bring fame. The New Yorker even called her the first real Youtube star. Her most famous video is “Crazed Numa Fan!!!” which is a lip sync­ing par­ody to the famous Numa Numa video.

Her comedic videos has landed her a devel­op­ment con­tract from Car­son Daly and has made her way into main­stream media. Her videos have mil­lions of views.

Will it Blend
Although for a prod­uct in itself, these videos went extremely viral. The videos por­trayed Tom Dick­son, founder of Blendtec, stands by his prod­uct in a lab coat and over the series put sev­eral dif­fer­ent items into the blender. These items include an iphone, golf balls, and even a bic lighter.

While not rec­om­mended for home, it was pretty enter­tain­ing to watch things get tore up by this blender (the iphone was lit­er­ally dust after wards). Of course I’m sure this helped with sales quite a bit. A big exam­ple of viral videos.

Chris Crocker
Chris Crocker even showed up in the news shortly after his infa­mous video “Leave Brit­ney Alone” where he tear­fully defended the pop star. He has received over 150 mil­lion views on his Youtube videos alone. He calls him­self an “edu­tainer”, openly talk­ing about his sex­ual ori­en­ta­tion. Almost all peo­ple have heard of his videos at some point or another.

Bo Burn­ham
This comedic singer has used social media and videos to bring him much fame for his not very polit­i­cally cor­rect music videos. He now has an agent and a book­ing on com­edy cen­tral. He does most of videos from his bed­room and tack­les a lot of taboo sub­jects in his songs.

What Can We Learn From These?

These are just a few of peo­ple that have become famous using the power of the inter­net. Let’s see what we can learn from these to put towards our online mar­ket­ing efforts.

- While it’s pos­si­ble to mar­ket in many ways, videos really do have a huge effect on going viral.

- Each one of these inter­net super­stars have one thing in com­mon: they are unique. They each have some­thing that makes them stand out.

- For the most part they built up to where they are today, one video at a time. Now they are in a posi­tion to make it into a career.

- They accu­mu­late a fol­low­ing and some of them are able to mon­e­tize that fol­low­ing. Not always, but it shows that hav­ing a fol­low­ing that love and trust you can make a dif­fer­ence in mak­ing sales.

What else can we learn from these famous viral inter­net stars? We can learn quite a bit from them even though they aren’t online marketers.

~Chris

What other peo­ple can you think of that are famous because of their con­tent going viral?

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