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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.

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Has Social Media Ruined the Christmas Card?

My husband and I used to pride ourselves on our Christmas cards. There was the cleverly art directed “Jack in the Box” one, where we forced my two-year-old son, Jack, into a box and bribed his two sisters with candy to adorn him as his jesters.

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There was the one from the year we spent at Harvard before the birth of Jack, when I hired a Harvard art student to take photos of the girls, fashionably dressed in red Hannah Andersen dresses (all the rage back in 1992), among the crimson red of the subway station. What you can’t see are the rats running beneath them as we snapped this shot. What you also don’t know is that it took said Harvard student three weeks to develop the film – by which point, Christmas had passed.

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My kids are older now and not so keen on being featured in our annual Christmas card mailing to our 500 closest friends (I lie not, I have the excel spreadsheet to prove it). But I’m beginning to wonder if social media hasn’t ruined the Christmas card. Why bother with stamps and envelopes if you can feature the smiling tots on Facebook trimming the tree, wearing wrapping paper as a crown, or participating in the general merriment that seems to span from Halloween to MLK day? Sitting on Santa’s lap, the tears and the joy can be Instagrammed ten times over. Who needs to buy the bad Polaroid shot anymore? For example, when MiMi took her little precious to sit on Santa’s lap, the resulting yawn of a YouTube video (featuring your typical bow-laden little innocent, dressed to the nines in velvet and crinoline and looking quite frankly clueless) got 27,000 views. Does all social media Christmas content have to be such a snooze?

I’m tempted to say “bah humbug” to social media and make a trek to the post office and buy some stamps (Have you heard the new Jimi Hendrix stamp is in stock?); but instead, I think I’ll explore some of the new possibilities that social media has to offer and spread my merriment well beyond my mailing list of 500 with my “gif” to you below!

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Kids As Brands’ Ambassadors

Having launched my career at Cartoon Network, I’m pretty familiar with the in’s and out’s of kids marketing. What’s really interesting to me is how kids are beginning to be marketed to on social media. The minimum age that Facebook says kids can join is 13, but the truth is that kids at the age of 9 are jumping on the social media bandwagon. It’s not just to chat with friends – They’re there to interact with brands too. To put this info into perspective with numbers: 55% of parents of 12 year olds say their child is on Facebook, 81% of online 9-17 year olds say they visited a social networking website within the last 3 months, and more than 25% of Facebook’s users are under the age of 10 (1).

No matter how you feel about social media marketing towards kids, let’s take a look at how some brands are using the medium to interact with youngsters. Note: I’ll shy away from Cartoon Network, since I’m a little biased towards them. 😉

Angry Birds
By engaging its customers on a variety of platforms and deepening the presence of its new brands, Rovio took Angry Bird’s social media presence to the next level. On Facebook, you can play two versions of it against your friends. While on Twitter, the brand engages fans in a variety of ways including product giveaways (which not many kids brands do), videos clips for upcoming game or level releases, retweets of user generated content. My favorite way that they engage their fans is by posting images of kids’ fan mail they’ve received. Why does Rovio do this? My hunch is they are showing kids that they care about what they say. They’re also developing “loyalty,” essentially making their kids fans ambassadors for many years to come.

Rovio Angry Birds Twitter Engagement

 

Nickelodeon
Using social media to poll one’s audience is red hot right now. And Nickelodeon is no stranger to the game. They activated their Facebook page with over 32.1 million likes to join in and vote on the Kid’s Choice Awards (2). They also incorporated both Twitter and gamification into their Kid’s Choice campaign strategy. Leaderboards showed “fan armies” supporting the nominees – fans could track who was winning and losing. Facebook/Twitter fans contributed to their favorite nominees’ placements on the board, creating the ever-elusive ‘engagement’. Nickelodeon extended its viewing audience beyond the channel, keeping fans engaged for weeks before the awards show, compared to previous years where consumers would only vote once. What I love about this strategy is that it engaged fans as true brand ambassadors. While I don’t know how it affected their viewership, I can imagine that fans who engaged on Facebook and Twitter so actively would want to tune in to find out who won.

 

Lucky Charms
While Lucky Charms may not be magically nutritious, it is magically smart when it comes to their social marketing strategy. General Mills created a webisode series on YouTube depicting the animated adventures of Lucky the leprechaun, linking them back to the Lucky Charms website, which states “Hey Kids, this is advertising” in the bottom corner. The site creates an immersive experience in Lucky’s world and asks kids to join the Adventurer’s Club, which houses their game stats and gems to be used in the flash games they offer on the site. Furthermore, they’ve got a load of comics depicting Lucky’s adventures. If you’ve ever eaten a bowl of Lucky Charms you know the intrigue of those marshmallow pink hearts or shooting stars. General Mills brought those marshmallows to life in a way that kids will surely share it with friends.

 

Disney
I admire Disney’s use of YouTube (3). They jumped on the beauty vlogging bandwagon and created a Disney Style account to convey tips, tricks, and how-to’s from top beauty, fashion, and DIY vloggers. Why is this a relevant way for Disney to spend its marketing dollars? The page posts tutorials on how to do you hair and make-up like Elsa or create a costume inspired by Miss Piggy; the videos are tied to recent releases and encourage fans to take their love of the brands offline and into the real world, sparking brand ambassadorship in these kids and making them walking, talking billboards.
Disney Style YouTube screenshot

 

So what does this all mean? Kids are on social and brands are there too, interacting with them. We can’t turn back the clock on social media and stop kids from joining and interacting. What brands should think about is what are the right channels to use and what’s ethical when it comes to younger kids who may not realize they are being marketed to. What’s interesting to me is that there are clever ways to reach out to kids and build brand loyalty without doing so in a devious manner.

Sources
1. http://www.guardchild.com/social-media-statistics-2
2. http://lostremote.com/why-is-spongebob-is-so-popular-on-social-nickelodeon-talks-about-social-tv-strategy_b30281
3. https://econsultancy.com/blog/64550-how-disney-uses-social-media-vine-youtube-pinterest-instagram-and-more#i.cts9cm1edxepb1