Everywhere Agency is a social media, content and influencer marketing firm. This is their Beat Cancer blog post archive.

How To Make Something Go Viral On Social Media (NOT)

It’s 2015 and I still get asked that dreaded question posed to nearly every social media marketer. That question is, “Can you make this go viral?” My answer is always the same, “You can’t make something go viral any more than you can make a toddler eat spinach.” I always stress to think “shareable” instead of viral and to think long and hard about your goals. Ultimately, the thing to ponder is whether you are building an idea or campaign that people will share without prompting. Going viral is an almost hopeless aspiration, yet there are a few strategies marketers can consider to encourage the possibility.

Here are three questions to pose if you’re thinking you have that viral campaign. After you ask these, you may just think again.

  1. Is it about you or is it about them? If you want people to share your campaign, it cannot be about you. It has to be about them, the sharer. Think of the Ice Bucket Challenge. We all know that ALS had nothing to do with the origins of that campaign. What made that concept go viral was the fact that it was about the sharer. Crazy folks around the globe decided it would be funny to drop a bucket of ice on their head. The act became about their reaction to said ice and along the way ALS was occasionally mentioned.
  2. Is it memorable? Any thing you want to be shared on social media has to be easy to repeat, easy to remember, easy to spell. When the Everywhere Agency won the Guinness World Record for #BeatCancer, it was because those two words, Beat and Cancer, were easy to remember and words you could not forget or confuse. Clients often come to me with concepts that align with their marketing strategy, but unfortunately don’t have that easy, memorable, catchy hook. If there’s a chance it can get misconstrued, misspelled or misaligned, it likely will be.
  3. Is it inherently shareable? We all hopefully learned about sharing sometime after we emerged from the toddler period of existence… but think about what’s shareable in your life now. Funny ideas, gossip, and breaking news all fall under that category. Your brand manifesto or marketing campaign is not. Shareable is something you go out of your way to do and if your campaign does not have that easy click, send appeal of gossip, or a funny story, it won’t get shared.

There’s a video right now on YouTube, which is sponsored by the Card Store. It’s called #WorldsToughestJob and it features a dude interviewing potential job candidates for a job which requires candidates to be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The potential job candidates are incredulous and frankly so are we as we watch. Who could expect anyone to be available, on your feet, ready to respond to any demand of your employer 365 days of the year, 7 days a week. The denouement comes when the dry interviewer reveals that the job in question is being a mom. Spoiler alert – you’ll need to get out your handkerchief at that point. The video has been viewed over 23M times (at the writing of this blog post) and it isn’t until the last 16 seconds of this 4-minute video that the brand is even mentioned.

That’s what I call shareable, er, viral.

Join Us To #BeatCancer

We’re at it again. We are setting out to #beatcancer and beat our previous Guinness World Record. We’ll be at BlogWorld this weekend and starting at 9 am PST today, Friday, October 15th lasting until 9 am PST tomorrow, Saturday 10/16 join us as we use social media for social good. Hopefully you’ll see tweets and Facebook posts in our effort to #beatcancer and beat our previous record. Along the way, we’re raising money for several cancer fighting organizations. SWAGG and PayPal will donate 5 cents (.05) for every tweet, Facebook status update, and blog post that includes #beatcancer. All money raised will be donated to non-profit cancer fighting organizations including Bright Pink, Stand Up To Cancer and the LIVESTRONG Foundation.

SWAGG’s commitment to the fight against cancer continues on from there. Prior to the official product launch, consumers can pledge to download the app at www.beatcancereverywhere.com. SWAGG will then donate $1 to Stand Up To Cancer, up to $125,000!

We all know someone who has been affected by cancer. Please take the next 24 hours to make a difference and help with the fight against cancer!

Thanks!
The Everywhere Team

Tweeting to #BeatCancer: 200,000+ Tweets So Far

By Pete Cashmore on Mashable

Twitter has been virtually taken over this weekend by a great cause: #BeatCancer gets brands to donate 1 cent for every tweet containing that hashtag. It’s been a huge success so far, with 200,000+ tweets being posted since the launch yesterday.

The campaign aims to break a Guinness World Record for the most social mentions, although it’s unclear where that record currently stands.

As we wrote yesterday:

The concept is rather simple. For every tweet, Facebook status update, or blog post containing the #beatcancer hashtag, eBay/PayPal and MillerCoors will be donating 1 cent to cancer research. With a captive audience of social media addicts, the hope is that the campaign will go viral and raise significant money for several charities.

More details are available on the beatcancereverywhere.com website, along with badges that you can embed on your blog to further expand the reach of the campaign.

Of course such campaigns could lose their effectiveness if overused – it’s also against Twitter’s Terms of Service to add unrelated hashtags to Tweets, since this is a common tactic of spammers wishing to turn up in Twitter search results. Nonetheless, as a one-off charity campaign, #BeatCancer appears to be an inspired idea that’s raising thousands of dollars for charity.

To read the article on Mashable, click here.

BLOGGERS AND TWEETERS UNITE FOR COMMON CAUSE AND ATTEMPT AT GUINNESS WORLD RECORD

10.16.2009 – LAS VEGAS – Attendees of the BlogWorld & New Media Expo in Las Vegas will use their powerful roles as social networking pioneers for an historic Guinness World Record attempt — Most Widespread Social Network Message in 24 Hours. The attempt, which will urge those in attendance and hundreds of thousands of their followers across the globe to distribute the message #BeatCancer, will also raise money for non-profit cancer organizations. The attempt will begin Friday, October 16th at 9am PST and end on Saturday, October 17th at 9am PST. The BlogWorld & New Media Expo features keynotes and panels with some of the biggest names in social media. This is a mass effort to show how social media can be used for social good.

Attendees of the conference and people all over the Internet will be asked to send tweets, issue Facebook status updates and blog using #BeatCancer in their posts. These messages will then be tracked and registered by Radian6, the premier social media monitoring service.

“The team at BlogWorld is proud to be part of this record-setting social media event,” said Rick Calvert, CEO of BlogWorld/New Media Expo. “We’re especially excited that we can be the launch point for bringing people together to help fight cancer.”

“We’re always on the lookout for new and exciting ideas, and when approached about a mass social media experiment that plans to rally people to support the fight against cancer were happy to oblige in adjudicating this record attempt,” said Stuart Claxton, Guinness World Records® spokesperson. “This will be the largest social media record attempt to be considered by Guinness World Records and will set a benchmark for social media monitoring moving forward.”

The social media experience is being produced by EVERYWHERE , an Atlanta based social media communications and content company. EVERYWHERE came up with the idea in conversation with CNN anchor, Don Lemon and other members of the EVERYWHERE team. Lemon says “Social media takes the power of an idea to an entirely new level. One minute EVERYWHERE and I are casually mulling over the possibilities of setting a social media record, the next minute it’s a reality that could save lives. Social media for social good. Incredible!” James Andrews, Managing Partner of EVERYWHERE says, “We earn our living in social media, helping big brands be relevant in this space. Because of this, we realized that Twitter and Facebook have the capacity to create change, as we recently saw in Iran. We decided that BlogWorld was the perfect opportunity to launch an effort to get people all over the world to take on a cause that has affected every single family.”

Read more

Social Media Campaign to Beat Cancer Eyes Record in Guinness Book

By Adam Ostrow in Mashable

Over the past few months, there’s been a tremendous amount of activity in utilizing social media for charitable causes. Perhaps the most notable recent example is Drew Carey’s bid of $1 million for the Twitter name @drew, with all of the proceeds being donated to cancer research.

Today, using the collection of hundreds of bloggers currently converged at Blog World Expo as an impetus, a social media fundraising effort is underway looking to set a Guinness Book World Record “for the distribution of the largest mass message through social media” in a 24 hour period.

The concept is rather simple. For every tweet, Facebook (Facebook) status update, or blog post containing the #beatcancer hashtag, eBay/PayPal and MillerCoors will be donating 1 cent to cancer research. With a captive audience of social media addicts, the hope is that the campaign will go viral and raise significant money for several charities.

More details are available on the beatcancereverywhere.com website, along with badges that you can embed on your blog to further expand the reach of the campaign. The site is also tracking total mentions, so you can see how the campaign is progressing throughout the day.

To read the story on Mashable, click here.