How does something go viral? A look at the Kony 2012 campaign.
If you ask most clients about what they hope to accomplish with their social media campaigns, they will probably tell you that they want to go viral. It’s the sort of thing marketers don’t like to hear, because it really can’t be promised. Even if you set everything up for success, there’s just no way to be sure if something will in fact go viral. It’s a tough thing to nail down, because it often seems to boil down to something hitting at just the right moment. It’s not an exact science. What we can do, however, is take a look at successful viral campaigns and try to figure out what made them work.
This past week, the “Kony 2012″ campaign took off like crazy. It started with a 30 minute documentary, which went crazy overnight. So what was it about this particular video that made it so popular? Well, as you start to peel back the layers of this story, you can see that it wasn’t just luck. This was a carefully crafted and well thought out campaign.
Once people watch the slickly produced video, they are directed to the campaign’s website where you can learn more about the organization behind the video and sign a pledge. However, the most impressive part of the website is the section below the video called “The Culturemakers”. In this section, people are encouraged to send messages to 20 different celebrities. By clicking on a celebrity photo, users can send an auto-generated tweet to the celebrity, with a link to the video and two related hashtags. It would probably only take about 2 minutes to send out individual tweets to all 20 of the celebrities listed here. This tactic is pretty genius, because these celebs were sure to notice the video after being bombarded with millions of tweets about it. In the end, it worked, as some of the celebrities listed did end up promoting the video, which lead to other celebrities talking about it as well. With all of these famous people discussing the film, the campaign was able to reach millions and millions of people within a couple of days.
After watching a video like this, people have a strong emotional reaction and they feel compelled to act. However, most people never actually do anything about it, because they find the process too complicated or confusing. What the Kony 2012 campaign did so well was to make it easy for people to act. All they asked of people was to click a button or two and doing so allowed them to feel like they had done something good and participated in a movement.
The one thing that all viral content seems to have in common – whether it’s some silly animal video or it’s about something much more serious – is that the content creates a strong emotional reaction and is easily shareable. Though the Kony 2012 campaign shows us that going viral isn’t just about luck, it’s also very much about strategy. The strategy this campaign used works really well for B2C brands, but do you think it could work for B2B brands? Have you seen any good examples for B2B campaigns that have gone viral? Please share your thoughts with us in the comments section.
