Ricky Van Veen of College Humor gave the opening keynote speech at the Mashable Media Summit today and discussed these “10 Myths of Branded Content/Viral Video”:

• Myth 1: People will watch my branded content.
• Myth 2: People will be patient with my content.
• Myth 3: People will find my content.
• Myth 4: The Internet is a level playing field.
• Myth 5: We have no idea why things go viral. The video should give user a reason to pass it along.
• Myth 6: Experience leads documentation.
• Myth 7: Let’s build our own community and tools.
• Myth 8: Let’s keep things professional.
• Myth 9: Traditional media is irrelevant to the web.
• Myth 10: People will create good content for me.

I think people don’t understand how important – and difficult – it is to intentionally create compelling, engaging content that inspires or entertains people enough to share it. It’s a challenge I face at ALISTmagazine.com: If I want audiences to come back to the site frequently (so I can reward the great people like Tom Paynter and Marc Brubaker for contributing to it), I have to make sure it provides something new and interesting every week, if not every day.

To work with the behavioral ADD of online audiences, I decided to create a variety of Easter eggs on the site. So if you go to A LIST and click around, you may just find gems like this…

Or like this…

And especially like this…

So, if you have a moment and feel like unearthing some surprise entertainment, visit http://www.alistmagazine.com and click around…happy hunting!

Prairie Dog Painting courtesy of DoobyBrain.

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