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Brian Morrissey of Mediaweek published an article today about the Rules of Viral Success that is a great read for anyone who works in advertising or is interested in understanding what tactics work in viral marketing.

He notes that one of the key components to a successful viral campaign is to focus on simplicity. He cites OfficeMax’s Elf Yourself and Burger King’s Simpsonizeme as good examples of sites that focus on one simple task that is then easily sent out to others in your social network. In advertising, creatives often try to out-do each other to the point that a simple site becomes buried with complexity. Morrissey cites Verizon’s Action Hero site as a site that had amazing functionality but lower user interaction, and hypothesizes that it is due to complexity of the site (which is down, but you can see an example of the videos you could make on YouTube).

The Elf Yourself campaign was smart, not only because it is so simple to use that even a grandmother can create a message, but also because it is one of the few recurring viral successes. OfficeMax was smart to re-introduce the application they created last year — and it points to how seasonality and simplicity can help advertisers who want to reuse content instead of reinventing the wheel each time they want to create a marketing campaign. Apparently people never tire of getting custom messages from their friends dressed as elves. I would imagine that OfficeMax will continue to use the Elf Yourself campaign in coming years, and it will become as intrinsic to the Christmas season as all those holiday songs that you hear, everywhere you go, for the 6 weeks leading up to Christmas.

Moral of the story: Follow the KISS principle, and steer away from user experiences that are overly complex. If the goal of the experience is to be viral, short experiences will more likely to be embraced.

In related news, Kevin Nalts of Will Video for Food recently published How to Become Popular on YouTube (Without Any Talent) that has some great pointers including tech details on how to shoot, edit and publish online videos. Key pointers include:

• Keep your content short
• Captivate in the first 20 seconds
• Finish with a big bang
• And interestingly, apparently participating in the highly influential Stickam community can result in getting large view counts on YouTube.