Behind the Scenes of an Accidental Viral Campaign

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[00:00:31] It is Tuesday, March 4th. Hello and welcome to our Tuesday Deep Dive episode. I'm Todd Maffin. Normally, when you listen to these things, you are expecting one of our ad platform columnists or maybe a marketing scientist. This week, something a little different. If you're following me on social media, you may know that I had a video go quite viral. And my good friend Steve Dotto, who is a legendary tech commentator, did an interview with me on his YouTube channel, which I highly recommend you follow.

[00:01:00] His YouTube channel is Dotto Tech. That's D-O-T-T-O-T-E-C-H. And he chatted with me about the viral campaign, its origins, and mostly about content marketing, how to exploit the TikTok algorithm and lessons for marketers trying to recreate that bit of magic. So here it is, Steve Dotto in conversation with me. Steve Dotto here. How the heck are you doing this fine day? Welcome to a special edition of Grey Matters, where we're going to take on just a single topic.

[00:01:29] I've got a guest coming up today, and we're going to talk about TikTok and about the viral nature of TikTok. Now, my guest today is Todd Maffin. I've known Todd for many, many years. Todd and I were colleagues in Canada. Todd was a host of a show on CBC Radio and a very popular speaker on the speaking circuit in Canada.

[00:01:51] At the same time as I was doing my TV show and I was a competitive speaker to Todd, we often talked about the same topics, but we became good friends. And Todd has since semi-retired. Well, he isn't semi-retired. He's moved to a small town on Vancouver Island, and he runs a digital agency is his primary business, as well as he does a newsletter on digital marketing. And Todd was dabbled a little bit in TikTok. Now, I've always been fascinated by TikTok.

[00:02:21] I haven't participated myself very much in TikTok, other than as a viewer, just as I occasionally doom scroll. And I do enjoy the interactive nature of TikTok, although I don't always necessarily enjoy the content. It certainly does a good job of rage-baiting me occasionally. But Todd goofed around a little bit on TikTok, had his own little account, and fooled around a bit.

[00:02:46] And then he decided to take on a little bit of a mission in TikTok. With the current unrest between Canada and the United States, Todd started to post just a little bit on TikTok about how Canadians can properly identify Canadian goods to buy as a part of the boycott that is going on in Canada right now.

[00:03:09] And his account went viral as a result of that, and kind of the process that he went through doing that. So today we're going to have a chat with Todd, and we're going to look at the viral nature of TikTok. We're not going to talk about the politics of the boycott, but instead we're going to talk about the content marketing aspect and the community growth and the viral nature of TikTok.

[00:03:36] And look at how his content took him from a small channel with very little momentum to quite a large channel, and then how he's leveraged that into some other activities. I think you'll find it a fascinating conversation if you're interested in content and social marketing. So today, joining me, Todd Maffin from Nanaimo, British Columbia. Because we've been friends for years, I was one of your followers. And you had like 200.

[00:04:05] It was a sad account, Todd. You're not wrong. You're not wrong. It was sad. And then all the stuff started happening between Canada and the U.S. in terms of trade tariffs. So I started this about a month ago when the tariff stuff started talking. And I started doing like how to buy Canadian. And those picked up quite a bit. Those were getting some traction. And my follower count went from about 300 or so to I think maybe 5,000 or 6,000, something in that range.

[00:04:32] And one of the interesting things, Steve, is that I noticed in the comments, it was because the content was basically saying, here's how to not buy American goods. And in the comments, the majority of them were Americans saying, we're cool with that. It's fine. Do not buy our products. We don't agree with what's going on either. I made a video. It was just a Friday night. I was bored. I was waiting for an Xbox game to install.

[00:04:57] And so I made a video and I said, hey, if Americans really do support Canada financially or want to, then why don't we just pick a weekend and a handful of you come up and shop in our stores. We can pick the same weekend. You guys can all come up. And I thought that a dozen would say something in the comments of my wife and I would pick them up at the ferry and take them out for lunch or something like that. And I put my phone down to do some dishes. And about a minute later, the phone just started ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, like notifications galore.

[00:05:25] A couple hundred in the first hour, all of them from Americans saying, if you're serious about this, we'll do that. And here's the interesting thing, Steve, about the TikTok algorithm and the way content seems to move through it that I learned is that it sends it out. We know this about TikTok, that it first sends it out to a percentage of your existing audience, of your followers, and it monitors to see what happens. But it also seems to send it out to a random group as well to see how it performs there.

[00:05:53] And for whatever reason, it grabbed onto Americans and politically active Americans. And if you watch all the way through the video, if you watch the video and then go to the creator's profile account, all of those are really good signals to the algorithm. And that seemed to be going forward. Yeah. And so overnight, you had like 2,000 people sign up for this?

[00:06:18] So I thought, yeah, I put up a little web form and I said, look, if you guys are serious about this and you think that there's a better than 50% chance that you would actually come up in April to my little city and spend the weekend and shop in our stores and eat in our restaurants and then fill out this form. I stopped it when we hit 2,000 people because I think I was going to run out of my form plan, my free plan. Oh, so you cut it off at 2,000 and that was quite a while ago and you've had a lot of publicity. That was about 72 hours.

[00:06:48] Yeah. It was 2,000. So you could have 10,000, 15,000 people without... I don't know if it's that many because I have a Discord as well. We can talk about that and how it plays into content later if you like. And so that's where I'm getting a gut feel. This sort of thing is, it's not an event in the traditional sense. I don't have a block of rooms booked. I don't have an event code. I don't know for sure how many people are coming. In the Discord, there's a channel called We Booked. And I've said, please only post here if you've actually booked your travel or your accommodation. It's moving so fast I haven't been able to count it, but it's certainly past a couple hundred people.

[00:07:17] And even if it's just 200, that in our local community will make a big difference. So as an academic exercise, thinking about social platforms, what you're describing in the algorithm that TikTok does is not really all that different than what YouTube does. YouTube puts stuff on your For You page and then based on people's watch time or their reaction to like or comments, negative or positive, then they start to expand it and they put it out into the different demographics that they think are going to be successful for you.

[00:07:47] But even with that, you had explosive growth in comparison to what your content was and what the topic was, etc. So what is it about TikTok? Do you think that the TikTok, the nature of TikTok, of the Twitch-related, you swipe to the next one, you move through so much content so quickly, do you think that played into the viral nature? It could be. And you're right. Like every platform has that kind of feeding system.

[00:08:16] Where they're different is where they give weight to certain actions. YouTube is watch time, certainly. Facebook and Instagram predominantly have been engagement metrics. Do you like it? Do you comment on it? Do you share it? None of these platforms voluntarily give this data away. Sometimes it leaks. But what people seem to have learned about TikTok is that the two main things that will propel it forward is when people... Sorry, three main things. Is if people watch the entire video all the way through, which is... Watch time.

[00:08:46] Watch time. And not just watch time, but have they finished the video, right? Percentage. Percentage. Yeah, exactly. The second big thing seems to be if people watch one of your videos, then go to your profile page and watch a few others. It's helpful. You can ask people to do that, right? So that's why a lot of creators you'll see on TikTok say, this is part two and find part three and four on my profile because they want you to go and click. And then the third one... That's becoming manipulative.

[00:09:15] I find that's becoming a bit manipulative. People are doing that on purpose. They're saying, here's a video, but then they won't show you that video until the next one. That's right. And sometimes people will... I've seen people trick you where they're like, this is part seven of a series. And it's not part seven. That was the first one you've done and probably the only one you've done. But damn it, I went to your page and looked. And then the third metric that TikTok seems to care about is have people shared it. So there's a bookmark icon.

[00:09:40] And it really likes if you send it to a friend via DM or if you download it. I did notice that... On my account for the longest time until quite recently. And when I turned downloads back on, when I said it's okay for people to download, I noticed a difference in terms of number of views. But you can send a link. And I think part of the reason that the algorithm rewards it is that it has the potential to bring

[00:10:08] new people into TikTok, brand new users, right? It's different. If you were to send that link to your daughter and she does not have the TikTok app installed, it shows up in a web browser on your phone with a big play icon. And when you go to play it, it's very tricky. Sometimes it plays, but I've noticed lately it just sends you to the app store and says install it. So it rewards you for getting people to... Prospectizing. Yeah.

[00:10:35] It's interesting to see how each one of the different platforms creates new limited gateways. They don't want to have a real big barrier for entry, but they do want you to commit. They do want you to commit and kind of move to the next level. Did you play with any of the duetting features or take advantage of the conversation? Like in YouTube, your conversations are people go into comments and that's it. That's your engagement. But TikTok has all of these other levels of engagement that you can have.

[00:11:05] Duetting when you play somebody else's video and then comment back and forth on it, which can be used from a positive and a negative perspective. Have you found much as far as additional growth through conversations and through those different interactive elements? I personally haven't, but only because I don't really use those too well. And you're right. So there's duet, there's stitch. Those are the two main ones. And YouTube has copied those, by the way. They have, I think they call theirs a remix or something like that. So they're all, when TikTok showed up, everyone started copying TikTok.

[00:11:34] It was like Snapchat. Everyone copied Snapchat. So I can't say that I've noticed a difference in that, but that's only because I don't really use them that much. Where it's helpful for me is that in the, in the inbox screen of the inbox tab of the TikTok app, one of the things you can do is go into activities is one of the main section and then pull down the top menu and change it to mentions. And that will show you people who have stitched your video. Okay. Or duetted your video.

[00:12:02] You can also, and I found this helpful. If you have a very busy channel, like mine appears to be right now, I've told it. I do not want notifications for new followers. I don't want notifications for comments. The only notification I want, excuse me, is for a mention. And that is when someone has duetted you or they've tagged you. They've amplified you. Yeah. Yeah. When they're deliberately amplifying. And I find that helpful to understand how it's being received.

[00:12:27] One of the downsides, Steve, to TikTok is they've been so busy heads down and with this band and everything that they have not really put a ton of work into their API. So there aren't really good third party tools to help you with this. There are third party. Between juggling client meetings and keeping up with what's changed in the marketing world, who has time to stress about website security? But security is important.

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[00:14:15] API for comments, for comments on videos, but it's only for organic comments. Platforms like Sprout Social and Hootsuite and Buffer can, I think, maybe not Buffer, but those big platforms can handle organic comments, but not ad comments, not mentions. They can't see mentions. And worse of all, no DMs. There's no API for DMs. Have you had a lot of good contact? Have you had kind of real value out of the DM section? Yeah, quite a bit. I used to have my DMs off because I just want people, I wanted to funnel people like NPCs

[00:14:45] in a video game. I wanted them to just go to my contact form. But the reality of the way mobile apps are and the way people use them is I would be missing out on opportunities. But, you know, I'm, look, I'm going to be 55 in a couple of months. I like the desktop apps. That's my comfort zone. I do not like answering DMs like this. But, and I'm checking this, it's a funny story. I was, I did a video at Canadian Tire because they have the cutest little marketing campaign on right now. And I did a video about that. And Canadian Tire DMed me and reached out to me.

[00:15:14] And they said, thank you very much. And I said, I'm glad you messaged. Listen, you guys have a really busy channel. How the hell are you managing DMs? Do you guys have, is there an API that I don't know? Is it somebody on a phone? And they do it all on a phone. So some poor social... That's ridiculous. That is not old person friendly. It's not at all. And so some poor social media manager is sitting at night on her phone doing DMs. So there's no...

[00:15:38] So anyway, all that to say that TikTok is still quite new in terms of backend support for third party tools. You can publish. You can see organic content. You cannot read ad related content. And sort of another side example. My main job is I have a social media engagement and moderation agency. We've got five employees. We handle engagement and moderation for clients. To monitor ad comments on TikTok, we have to manually go into the TikTok backend and look

[00:16:08] at it through their interface. And their interface is horrible. It's just... Oh. Yeah. You didn't wake up one morning and say, I'd like to be an agent for tourism Nanaimo. No. Right? So you had this kind of this inflection point. Have you tried to cross promote or amplify the message and take advantage of repurposing the content and repurposing the success in TikTok on your other platforms? And what's that look like? Yes. That's a good question.

[00:16:37] So I don't use meta platforms anymore at all. So none of this is on Instagram or Facebook or threads. But I was... What I was doing was... So when you record a video in TikTok, I should say there is rumor that you get a better algorithm juice if the video is recorded in the TikTok app as opposed to produced in Final Cut or something and then uploaded to it. I haven't seen any actual data around that. So I don't know for sure. But that's certainly a rumor that's floating around. And there's an app CapCut, which is very popular for that, right?

[00:17:07] And CapCut is owned by ByteDance, which also owns TikTok. So perhaps there's a better thing in there. And I have certainly noticed that when I use an external tool, my views are not nearly as good. Whether it's because it's an external tool or because the video that comes from external tools tend to be more produced. And TikTok doesn't seem to like that. The algorithm prefers one-offs. I don't know. I think people prefer it too. People prefer the kind of organic feel. They do. Yeah, for sure. What was your original question? Sorry, I lost track because now I'm...

[00:17:36] Well, just about how you were repurposing and how you're extending it into other platforms. One of the options you can do when you create a TikTok video, it's buried in like the final screen, is do you want to save this to your phone as a video? You should have that on. And the reason why is if you don't have that on, if you then download your video from TikTok, it will have the TikTok watermark. And it will move around the screen. It's irritating. There are free websites.

[00:18:03] One is called SSTick, which will let you download. You get the link of any video on TikTok and you give it that link and you can download it and it strips out that thing. So there are ways around it. But when you shoot it in the video, when you post it to TikTok, if you have that feature on, it will have a clean, no watermark version of that video on your phone. And what I was doing was I was taking that, manually uploading it to YouTube, which worked. And my YouTube channel is picking up wind, which is great.

[00:18:33] But I also happen to have for my business a service that we use called repurpose.io, which I know you're familiar with. Repurpose is a great tool. It's pretty rock solid, I've certainly found. So now what I have is I've set up what they call a workflow. So I've given it authorization to my TikTok account. I've given it authorization to my YouTube account. And I've said, listen, any time you see a video on my TikTok, I want you to automatically put it on YouTube.

[00:19:02] It does it within anywhere from five minutes to about an hour and a half or so. And what I love about it is that you can even have it move things around into different playlists for you on YouTube based on like a hashtag that you use. So whenever I do, whenever I do a hashtag Nanaimo infusion, it will put it into my YouTube playlist called Nanaimo infusion. If I do hashtag by Canadian, it will put it into my by Canadian thing.

[00:19:30] Anything without a hashtag, it just dumps into my general feed unless I use hashtag no on TikTok, which is like the code word that I've given it. If it sees hashtag no in one of my TikTok videos, do not send this to YouTube. Don't repurpose it. Don't repurpose it. It's rock solid. It's great. The other nice thing about repurpose is you can feed it an intro video and an extra video. So it'll automatically slap on a little bit of branding if you want it to.

[00:19:57] Now, are those going as as YouTube videos or are they going in shorts? It doesn't. You can pick. So when you set up that workflow, you say take it off TikTok and it'll say, OK, what's the destination? And you say YouTube. And it says what format do you want it to be in? Shorts or regular video? In theory, you could and I probably should for more views. You could set up two workflows. One that takes a TikTok video and makes it a YouTube short. And the other that takes the same TikTok video and makes it a regular video.

[00:20:27] And what about for the metadata, for the description? Do you have a template? The description carries over. So whatever you put in the caption will appear in the caption on YouTube. You can also tell it to always add some extra text to it. That's really great if you have a business and you want people to go to your website and you forget to add it to TikTok or something, it will automatically when it does that repurpose, when it sends it over to YouTube, it will automatically add sign up for gray matters at such and such

[00:20:57] at dotto tech dot com or whatever. It'll just add that to the description every time. Yeah. And you could you could have like the same way you do a profile link inside of an Instagram or inside of TikTok. You can have like a link tree or a link page that you can have dynamic and you can have all of your most current contact stuff happen. And it will do that. I should say that it'll do that from anything to anything. So it supports Facebook Reels, Facebook videos. It supports Instagram. It supports threads. It supports Snapchat. It supports Pinterest.

[00:21:26] It supports a ton. And you can have it. You can have it watch your Pinterest and send that to all of them. In fact, the way we use it for my newsletter and podcast is it's watching our TikTok account and it's sending it to YouTube and Pinterest as a video pin and Snapchat as a video and a bunch of other places. But you could have it the other way. You could say, listen, we're actually only on Snapchat. That's where we post. So you could say, watch Snapchat and then send it to everywhere else. Yeah. It's a great tool and reasonably inexpensive.

[00:21:54] So we'll share, of course, all links in the description here. But you've had this opportunity drop in your lap and you've got a short-term goal where February 25th that we're recording this and your event is April 25th, I think? April 25th, 27th. So February, March, April. So two months. You've got two months that you're going to be kind of looking for new opportunities and growing. And I'm sure that the city in Nanaimo will, that they'll be, it'll, it'll grow into something larger.

[00:22:22] You're going to have Todd Palooza basically happening in Nanaimo. So this is going to be kind of, it's going to, it'll grow to be more than you bargained at the beginning. It already has. But what's next? Do you see you taking advantage of this viral opportunity that presented itself, which does have a best before date right now. Yeah. And do you see how, but now all of a sudden you've got 60, by the time this is done, you probably have a hundred thousand followers on TikTok. How do you plan to leverage that?

[00:22:52] I have not given that a lot of thought, which is unusual for me because I'm usually pretty entrepreneurial and don't want to look a gift horse in the mouth. I've not given that a ton of thought. I'll tell you what I have been doing lately because I'm hoping to retire in five or six years and sell the agency and sell the newsletter. And so my head has been like, I have a, I have a little note that's like things I can do when I retire. I would be thrilled if I can just do what I'm doing now, which is like run around Nanaimo, which is where I live, which is on Vancouver Island in Canada. It's beautiful.

[00:23:21] By the way, you should come. Not you, Steve. You come here all the time, but I would be thrilled. I shouldn't come? Huh? Not you, Steve. You shouldn't come. I would be thrilled if what I do after this is continuing doing what I've been doing after all this sort of blew up. My wife, Jocelyn, who you also know very well is thrilled that I'm getting out of the house a lot more. I'm going to like Westwood Lake and I'm going to Collier Dam and I'm wandering around the

[00:23:49] other shopping districts and I'm going to, I'm exploring the city, making these TikTok videos for other, for the people who are on the channel. I'd be thrilled if that's what this ends up being is just being like an unofficial ambassador for Vancouver Island. It's, it's a, it's a well, it's a well-trodden path. I mean, our, our friend, Ms. 604, Rebecca, you know, she's done very well with that in Vancouver area. There's in, you know, that term influencer, which can be bandied about and can be, it

[00:24:16] can have some negative connotations as really positive connotations when you become an ambassador for your, for your area. And it does get you engaged in everything around. I think it's been, it's, it's, it might end up well being a real blessing for you as you move ahead. So I love the, I love it. I like the story and I'm going to be excited to see how April 25th works out. So if so, thank you so much, Todd. Todd Maffin, thank you so much.

[00:24:41] I will put all of Todd's information, all of his links in the description, as well as links to the event. Should you listen to this podcast before April 25th, I believe is the date you can, you can get more information about it if you happen to be interested. Now, a quick reminder that this show, Gray Matters, is a show that's dedicated to baby boomers and Gen X and really focused on our digital lives. It's primarily how, how the online world affects us and also the world of online business and

[00:25:09] content creation, the opportunities that exist for those of us to, to build businesses and build opportunities online. And this particular topic that we were on today, it was about TikTok and about using the TikTok and how the TikTok algorithm works and how TikTok can be an effective platform. It wasn't about the political side of this conversation. Yes, Todd's site did start, or Todd's TikTok profile exploded as a result of political discussion.

[00:25:35] But I don't really want to see the comments in YouTube devolve into political discourse and people tossing insults back and forth. That's not what this is about. Perhaps at some point in the future, we can have a political conversation about what's happening between my country, Canada and the States. But this is not the time for that. This is not the place for that. We want to, we want to discuss the social platforms and, uh, the, the unique nature of viral growth on TikTok. So I'm just going to ask you to keep the comments in that area.

[00:26:03] And we certainly welcome all comments that are of that nature. With that, I encourage you to subscribe to this channel if you have not yet done so. And you can also tune into this podcast on all of your favorite podcast platforms. So with that, until next time, have fun storming the castle. Steve Dotto, his YouTube channel is DottoTech. That's D-O-T-T-O-T-E-C-H. I'm Todd Maffin. See you Friday for our wrap up.