As marketers, our job is to spread the news about our products or services to as many relevant people as possible using various channels. What marketer wouldn’t want his/her new campaign to go viral and be shared by millions of people? At the end of the day, in an overcrowded competitive landscape it is all about awareness and being top of mind so when consumers want a product, yours is the first one they think about.
But how do you design a campaign that will have a better chance of catching on? After all, 50% of the videos on YouTube have less than 500 views. If nobody passes the message along, then nobody will know about your product.
Can anything go viral?
Conventional wisdom suggests that some ideas are naturally contagious and some aren’t. And this makes intuitive sense if you think about an interesting product such as a cool new smartphone versus a boring old kitchen blender. But when you think about how the ‘Will it blend?’ video series from Blendtec went viral, it makes you question the convention.
Jonah Berger offers a framework to make ideas go viral in his book Contagious. After researching hundreds of campaigns that went viral on YouTube and other social media channels, he identified 6 qualities that are common to all of these ideas, which suggests that virality is not born, it is made.