HOW TO GO VIRALAND SPREAD LIKE AN STD

THE WRITE MOMS

Gangnum Style

The label behind Gangnam, YG Entertainment, had 2.5M subscribers pre-Gangnam and had achieved in the region of 1.6 billion views of musicians’ videos across those channels.

YG Entertainment featured popular celebrities from South Korea they knew this would get the media’s attention. They had a famous entertainer who is the chap thrusting in the lift, the guy in the yellow suit is a renowned comedian and the kid is popular from Korea’s Got Talent. All helping it debut at number one in the Korean Pop Chart and gain 500k views on its launch day of 15th July.

On 30th July Gawker wrote it up leading to 19k in Facebook likes/shares. Then Billboard followed by celebrity tweets. Coverage in Time Magazine and Mashable followed.

Activity over the next two weeks triggered the biggest spike in the entire campaign, as Scooter Braun made some inspired media bookings. Psy appeared at the MTV Awards as a last minute guest and then Ellen alongside Britney Spears. Britney (of course) tweeted this, creating a huge 1.3m tweets containing the term "Gangnam Style" over those few days alone.

Just as growth started to slow again, Scooter got Psy a spot on NBC Today show, and a second appearance on Ellen, that triggered a final but forceful spike in searches, tweets and video likes.

From Social Media Today

Mitt Romney Style

College Humor's Spoof of Gangnum Style

After Psy’s success with Gangnum Style, many video spoofs followed including College Humor’s Mitt Romney Style.

It received over 58 million views on their YouTube.

Media who shared the video includes:

•Huffpost (several times)•USA Today•Raw Story•Politico•Genius•Newsfeed•Studio 360•Daily Caller•Moose Radio

Trololo Video

On December 20th, 2009, an isolated clip of the laughing section from the original video was uploaded by YouTuber KamoKatt. Within three years, the video accumulated over 6.6 million views. On January 27th, 2010, Redditor gn3xu5 submitted the video to the /r/WTF[4] subreddit in a post titled “Trololololololololo”, which received over 580 up votes and 95 comments prior to being archived. On February 19th, the viral content site BuzzFeed[10] published the video in a post titled “Lyrical Genius.” Two days later, The Huffington Post[8] included the video in an article titled “Is This Weird Russian Guy the Best Lyricist of All Time? No.” On February 26th, the single serving site Trololololololololololo[7] was launched, which featured an embed of the original video on autoplay.

On March 4th, YouTuber RayWilliamJohnson featured the video in an episode of his web show Equals Three (shown above, left), in which he suggested the video should be “the next Rickroll.” On August 25th, YouTuber 24KaratGoldFish uploaded a time stretched version of the video titled “Trololo – 800% Hyper Extrended Mix”. The song was also covered during the opening ceremonies to the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi,[17] Russia.

From Know Your Meme

This old video resurfaced on the internet making this man incredibly famous behind his back. He didn't know it was going viral until a family member showed him.

The Holderness Family

This family struggled finding the perfect Christmas Card pose, so they made a video instead titled #XMAS Jammies. It went organically viral beyond their wildest imaginations by sheer accident somehow (great talent and hilarity).

Not much has been said about the details of the Holderness Family’s Christmas Card Video going viral. But if you Google it, you’ll find more articles about the second Christmas video than the first, meaning the second one probably received more publicity than the first; however, the second video has about 800,000 views whereas the first has over 16 million views.

While publicity is a must in the game of going viral, it doesn’t always guarantee viral activity. You can’t even consider the content because both videos were equally genius. P.S. I love this family. Check out their Website.

Poo PouriPoo~Pourri’s founder Suzy Batiz knew she wanted marketing genius Jeffrey Harmon to do her first youtube commercial, so she messaged him repeatedly on Linked In until they finally connected.

Nicole Story, Poo Marketing Director of Poo~Pourri explained her Facebook strategy, “I like to go by the 10-1 rule. For every 1 hard-sell/product post, I try to post 10 entertainment posts. People don't come to Facebook to be sold, they come to Facebook to escape their day and to be entertained….”

From Social Media Today

Things that Made This Awesome

1. Unique, compelling, entertaining and informative.2. Hooks viewers in the first 15 seconds, and keeps them watching. 3. Specific call-to-action near the end of the video.4. Metadata is optimized. The title is compelling and includes a phrase that gets 390 average monthly searches. The description is 549 words or 3,756 characters long and includes lots of keywords.5. The thumbnail is optimized6. Social Media7. Blog Outreach From REELSEO

Planking

It began 14 years ago with a pair of bored kids. Gary Clarkson, then 15, and his friend Christian Langdon, 12, would perform the plank in public places, amusing one another and baffling onlookers.

For its first 10 years planking spread at a snail's pace, from Clarkson and Langdon to their friends at school and, after a while, on to other kids from the neighbourhood. Then, in 2007, when the pair created a Facebook group for their game, the pace accelerated. Soon, they had a few thousand followers. Photographs of plankers trickled in from all over the world: American plankers on the tops of their televisions, British plankers in trees, and Europeans on country roads and the banks of fjords.

The craze began to garner its first major press coverage in September 2009, when a group of seven accident-and-emergency staff were suspended pending disciplinary hearings for playing the game while on a night shift at the Great Western Hospital in Swindon. They had been planking on resuscitation trolleys, ward beds, floors and even the helipad.

Things escalated. A few days later, in Stoke-on-Trent, a mass gathering of plankers for a simultaneous lie down attracted more than 100 people. The photos posted to Facebook became bolder and more bizarre.

From The Guardian

BASIC COMPONENTS OF VIRAL CONTENT

PlanningSome viral content is planned enough, even if the expectation for virality wasn’t present. The basics were always covered: coming up with quality content, spreading the word, and managing new people with a call to action.

A Community BaseA good community base is key to spreading the word organically. For those with small community bases, get the word out on larger community bases like Reddit.

BASIC COMPONENTS OF VIRAL CONTENT

Emotional Content

Content with high arousal emotions get shared more than something that doesn't invoke an emotion, and Social Triggers state that the content-contagious, high-arousal emotions include Awe, Anger, Anxiety, Fear, Joy, Lust and Surprise. The Holderness Family who made #XMAS Jammies brought up the importance of telling a good story in the content on their Visit the Greenroom's blog.

Speaks to Multiple Communities

They tell you that Niche is almost necessary for things like blogging; however, viral content speaks to a diverse range of audience. It won't leave the Niche Community if it's too niche. In order for something to hit the mainstream, it has to be mainstream material.

VIRAL COMPONENTS OF VIRAL CONTENT

Community Setting◦ Most studies consider viral material to be complex contagions, meaning you have to see it 3 or 4 times

before you share it. According to Psyc Central, "Researchers discovered that it takes a minority of just five per cent to influence a crowd’s direction – and that the other 95 per cent follow without realizing it."

◦ While all that is true in content sharing (especially within your community), viral activity behaves different than that. One study showed that on Twitter, viral tweets spread like simple contagions rather than complex ones. Meaning, the things that go viral are loved by members of multiple communities the first time they see it.

◦ So, ideally, you want to make sure the community base you introduce content to has access to other community bases.

VIRAL COMPONENTS OF VIRAL CONTENT

Media Coverage and Celebrities◦ More media coverage means more people. While you can have media coverage and not go

viral, when things are going viral, media coverage and celebrities keep the ball rolling.

Reddit◦ It rather seems that most memes like Cereal Guy and Condescending Willy Wonka made their

way to fame via Reddit. The more up votes, the more coverage.

OK So this didn’t really tell you how to go viral, but we looked into viral things and did research. Fastest

trip possible into things you would have never thought to Google.

You’re welcome