When the ''mutes'' start singing: a consumer behavior perspective on online video upload and user activation on YouTube

3 When the “Mutes” start singing: a Consumer Behavior Perspective on Online Video Upload and User Activation on YouTube NICCOLO’ MARIA MORONATO Activating customers through viral video campaigns is the main objective of YouTube advertisers. Only a few of them, however, understand how to appeal to new customers in an environment which seems to be dominated by behavioral variables different from the ones traditionally found in other Media. Google and its clients engage almost every week in campaigns to get more and more people to upload user-generated videos on YouTube, pumping up the channel’s average video responding rate. This work intends to expand the consumer behavior theoretical knowledge about the act of uploading videos. It also aims at providing marketers and website administrators with new insights and tools to maximize the number of video responses to a viral video campaign through consumer research. arketing Management in the Age of the Proactive Individual is no easy game. Consumers have been blossoming in many different and multi-faceted ways so far, forcing Companies - which are, all in all, made of consumers as well - to allocate every nickel and every minute of their resources on listening to, and inspiring individuals and groups, both in business-to-business and business-to-consumer landscapes. The proliferation of digital technology has made it easier for people to create their own entertainment content, User Generated Content (UGC from now on). With consumer engagement the new law of the land, advertisers are therefore beginning to create their own expressions of brands (Morrissey, 2005). Digital technology convergence and widespread connectivity taken for granted, some sort of “mass creativization” appears as the newer species of the mass-customized and co-creative breed of new postmodern individuals. Philosophical (Benjamin, 1936; Lyotard 1979), Persuasion (Gardner, 1985; Batra & Stayman, 1990; Bakamitsos & Siomkos, 2004), Sociological (Castells, 1996) Psyhological (Csíkszentmihályi, 1996) and Strategic (Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004; Prandelli, Sawhney and Verona, 2005; Kalyanam, McIntyre & Masonis, 2007) discourses, explanations and portents for such an Age have been out there quite a long time, intriguing academics, executives and schools of college students with juicy insights and attractive hypotheses about the shape of the near future. However, it has not been long since the first few scientific consumer behavior researches on the “new” consumers have been unveiling an amazingly complex intersection of merging research strains such as positive psychology (Csíkszentmihályi, 1996), relationship theory M