What does going viral mean anyway?

Everyday it happens, some new no-name individual becomes a celebrity for doing something shock worthy or ultra cool on YouTube.

After seeing this day after day I asked the question, how before web 2.0 did trends go viral? We didn’t call them viral but these wildfire trends still existed, leather jackets, bell-bottoms, acid washed jeans, headbands, and even light up sneakers.  Going viral is nothing new.

Yet today brand after brand quest to become the next viral trend, searching for that elusive million plus views on YouTube. Many times brands don’t even have control over what happens after viral status is achieved; the ‘Icing’ trend was a PR nightmare for Smirnoff as the point of the trend was to use the brand as a tool to shame others.

So it hit me, in the past viral trends still occurred, they just had to be much more significant.

There are two types of viral trends:

1.    Shocking, bad for brand
2.    Cool, good for brand

If you think back to what you have seen, the cool trends almost never originate online they just documented there.

So to create a viral trend that we can control, it’s not just uploading a cool video, it means actually influencing people on an individual basis.

Here are the steps to generating a trend:

1.    Define what market that you want consuming the brand.
2.    Understand who is actually interacting the brand
3.    Where does the market interact?
4.    Engage those individuals on a direct one to one level.

Most brands understand number one perfectly, the breakdown begins on level two when brands don’t listen to the market. If point two is not understood then the brand will not understand where the audience interacts. The final step is the most important in today’s high noise level, engaging people on a one to one basis. Mass marketing, as a sole strategy is dead, highly targeted niche marketing that is medium neutral is the way to only way to actively engage people.

With all the lazy marketing today, we must filter out a lot of info.  For me to really act it must really impact me personally, otherwise the brand runs the risk of being another name on a billboard that stands for nothing more than a highly guarded corporate trademark.

Evan Burns, CEO, Olympia Media Group