• by Daisy Whitney , Op-Ed Contributor, July 25, 2012

I tried to be stoic. I tried to be jaded. I was sure I wouldn’t shed a single tear.

But P&G won. I cried when I finally watched this P&G “Best Job in the World” spot for the Olympic Games. I’m not the only one; the ad has racked up more than 12 million views across video sites, according to social video platform Unruly Media. P&G is also the top Olympics brand so far in terms of social video reach, the company said.

I asked Unruly’s chief operating officer and founder Sarah Wood what other brands can learn from the Olympics example set by P&G. Sure, videos about the Olympics are bound to do well right now. But what takeaways can other brands implement year round?

“You don’t need a track record in social video to do it well. It comes down to content creation and distribution,” she said. Any brand, small or large, can benefit by keeping a few guidelines in mind.

For starters, research has shown that the top factor in generating shares is an emotional trigger. “People want to feel excited, happy, shocked, disgusted. All these physical emotions are needed to generate a share,” Wood said. Top triggers include videos that are funny, sexy, shocking, controversial, unbelievable, cute or uplifting, Unruly research has shown.

Distribution is next, and the key to success is placing video in the right place -- be it Facebook or Twitter, mobile and tablet apps, games, blogs, social discovery engines such as BuzzFeed and StumbleUpon, and video search, she said. Those are often the sites where tastemakers and influencers uncover videos for the first time. Across the best-performing videos, both user-generated and branded videos have the same level of sharing-to-views ratio, she said. “If it’s awesome content they want to share it.”

Last month, Unruly started testing many of the videos it distributes for brands in its labs, using biometric testing with panel groups, to make sure the videos meet content benchmarks. “It needs to not just be funny, but the funniest video you have seen all week,” Wood explained.

The payoff can be worth it. Brand recall and brand association both jumped 7% for viewers who had been recommended videos, compared to those who found branded videos by browsing.