How do you make something go viral?

You’re asking the wrong question.

Everyone wants to know how to “go viral.” If you’ve worked in a marketing department with a social strategy of any sort, someone, at some point, has said something to you to the effect of “we need to work on our viral outreach effort. Can you please draw up your plan?”

I’ve had a bunch of things go viral over the course of my career. And I’m going to spoil this article for you right now:

There is no magic that will make anything go viral on the internet.

If there’s any brand I can point to that won viral marketing, it’s Old Spice in 2010. I’m sure you remember the campaign: YouTube videos made in a bathroom, replying almost in real time to questions and comments from social media.

The campaign was nothing short of genius. The brand had already established a tone and character that was beloved amongst fans. It took that idea to the next level by empowering and celebrating fans’ voices in real time. By doing so, they created marketing so delightful no one would really call what they did an advertisement first: it really was entertainment. The quantity and quality of videos they created (185 in all) and the time period for which they sustained the campaign (over 2 days) was nothing short of awe inspiring — and not just for the marketing eggheads like myself.

Old Spice captured lightning in a bottle with that campaign, but they didn’t have giant success by chance: they did it by understanding their audience and what makes good content.

This is why, after the Old Spice campaign, many people tried to replicate, iterate, and innovate on this idea — and none of them came close to what Old Spice achieved.

To catch the Internet’s attention, you need to be wholly unique and you need to understand in the marrow of your bones who you are talking to and what makes them tick.

The Internet is a giant place: not everything that goes viral needs to sweep through the mainstream channels of the web like Old Spice (or more recently, The Dress) did. Virality can happen on a much smaller scale amongst an audience that cares about one particular thing. This is what most people are vying for: brands want everyone who might buy their widget or service to see their viral marketing effort, love it, share it with all their friends, and become brand ambassadors for life.

I’m going to talk about a couple things I’ve done over the course of my career that have achieved the lauded “viral success.” I work in tech, and for almost a decade, specifically video games. Both of those industries have an unhealthy obsession with the unicorn that is the viral marketing smash hit. So, as much as I die a little inside to say it, this is an area where I have expertise.

Because I call myself an expert in viral marketing, I speak with authority when I say that claiming you have expertise in making things go viral is complete and utter bullshit.

My first successful viral marketing campaign happened in early 2009. I was the Community Manager at 2K Games. I had a challenge ahead of me: BioShock 2, the sequel to a massively successful first person shooter, was in production and we needed a campaign to excite and mobilize the community from the moment of announcement through the game’s launch. The problem? The development team was neck deep in actually making the game: any program I came up had to happen without relying on any dev resources.

For someone trying to hype up a video game, being told to do it without the team or assets is a bit of a bugger. And by “bugger” I mean “a complete fucking nightmare.”

I’m a big fan of augmented and alternate reality games (ARGs) and during the many sleepless nights that came after being given this task, I realized that an ARG would marry perfectly with the rich world in which BioShock is set.

Enter Something in the Sea.

The site launched quietly, with no ad spend. It was wholly inspired by Halo’s “I Love Bees” and The Dark Knight’s “Why So Serious” ARGs, both made by the brilliant 42 Entertainment. The launch coincided with the first game’s release on PlayStation 3 (which had a hidden trailer for the sequel.) This is the internet age, though, and nothing stays hidden for long. On the first day of Something in the Sea’s existence, it received over 700,000 unique hits and enormous pickup in the media. In short: it was a viral marketing success story for the ages.

But could it sustain?

The campaign was originally designed to last approximately 9 months. It ended up being 14. Through that time, the website remained the base, changing every day with new information, puzzles, and clues. But the project was much more than just a site: it included mailings, conventions that replicated the digital room in the real world and made new puzzles that people had to physically solve to continue the story. There was even a manhunt with a global treasure hunt for the final act of the game. We set up a mailing address for our fictional character and received tens of thousands of pieces of mail. We sent couriers to people’s houses on vintage bikes to deliver clues. We created a complicated breadcrumb trail that ended with thousands of people around the world going to 10 beaches on three continents before dawn. Gaming websites actually set up a category called “BioShock 2 Viral Marketing” to follow the story. Even fans used the term in a non-ironic, nay, positive way. Seriously, a gamer posted “This is probably one of the best viral marketing schemes I’ve ever seen. I’m pretty impressed with the marketing team that came up with this one ” and they were being completely and utterly sincere.

How do you get almost a million unique visitors to a viral site in a day without any ad spend or development resources from the dev team? A great product and an obsessive understanding of who your fans are and why they love what you make.

We could never have received multiple millions of unique visitors to the site, tens of thousands of attendees to our events in the real world, several satchels worth of fan mail, and scores of press hits over the course of a year by just knowing our fans. We lived and breathed them, got inside of what made them tick, and stayed in that mindset day and night for the entire campaign. Without that kind of obsession (and I don’t use that word lightly) and ingrained knowledge of the people who we were trying to entertain, our project would have been a flash in the pan.

In the end, Something in the Sea not only exceeded the marketing goals we set up, it kept interest and excitement despite release date delays (often a crippling problem for a marketing campaign, particularly one with a finite amount of assets as was the case with this game.) The campaign also snagged several awards and won the heart of the dev team: they integrated the character into the game.

In case you were getting worried, I’m not saying that all viral marketing has to be a Herculean feat. Great things have been created without the need to lock yourself in a warehouse for several days or spend the over a year living mostly in a fictional world.

The BioShock 2 Unboxing Video was another viral marketing success story. While it’s the same game as before, it was a very different campaign with very different goals. This time, our challenge was promoting a $150 Special Edition. In 2010, unboxing videos were all the rage. (Yeah — I’ve watch a Macbook unboxing on YouTube. I’m only a little ashamed to admit that.) As a group, we collectively cringed at the thought of making just another lame unboxing video. Yes, they got hundreds of thousands of views, but they were boring and obvious marketing stunts to peddle the wares of a very expensive upgrade to an already expensive product.

Using our distaste for unboxing videos and harnessing that snarkiness, we made an unboxing video that did show off the Special Edition we were selling, but added a twist by creating a fictional $14,999 Uber Edition.

Yes, we built a fully functioning suit like the in-game character wears for this video. Yes, we ordered sugar glass from a prop house in Hollywood. Yes, I had to convince the building manager that he had to put said sugar glass in my VP’s window or else I totally would just break the actual glass. Yes, that’s actually the real office, complete with all my real coworkers and bosses.

The video got almost a quarter million hits on its original YouTube channel, and several million views cumulatively when adding up all the press and fan reposts.

While fans and press alike knew we made this video to sell more copies of our expensive special edition, they still loved it because we understood not only current cultural trends but also the consumer’s love-hate relationship with them. Why?

Because we are those consumers. We thought about the video as fans, not as number-crunching marketers, and we made the thing that had us doubled over in giggles during the brainstorming meeting.

And then there’s social media.

Specifically: reddit.

First, a disclaimer.

If you are going to dabble in social media as an official spokesperson, you better make damned sure you not only understand the ins and outs of that platform’s community, but that you are already an organic part of that community before you start trying to be an official spokesperson.

If you don’t do this, we’re not just talking about your viral or social marketing stunt not working, we’re talking about you being labeled a shill and being driven out of town with pitchforks. And rightfully so. There are many ways to promote something in a more organic fashion than traditional marketing. If you aren’t an authentic member of a community first, you don’t belong there as a brand. You’ll never succeed in winning their trust and getting them to listen to or respect you because you didn’t first listen to and respect them.

My reddit story is the tale of two posts. First: customer service.

The redditor’s beef with the CS team was valid: the agent got confused about megabytes and gigabytes in an embarrassing way.

I was running the customer service department when this post published (around 10:30 PM on a random weekday.) I saw the post while browsing the web, checked my support system to verify the problem, and answered the poster.

The thread and my reply got a massive amount of upvotes, hitting the top of the subreddit (not an easy feat for a category as big as Gaming.)

How’d I win the day here?

I acted like a real person.

I know. Shocking, right? Honesty, empathy, and humor goes a long way. Standing up and saying “well, that’s not right. Let me fix that” leaves you vulnerable, but it is also a breath of fresh air: admitting fault is a rarity in business these days, even if the fault is painfully obvious. Am I advocating public admission of messing up? That’s a terrifying gamble: and that’s exactly why you should do it.

My second reddit story involves another gaming collector’s editions. This time, we’re talking Borderlands 2. The special edition came packed in a badass miniature version of an in-game loot chest. Folks wanted to know how big the loot chest actually was so I, of course, sat my miniature dachshund in our prototype and threw the pictures online.

Instant internet success.

This post featuring my dog (her name’s Pancake) also made the front page of reddit, but more than that it spawned a dozen articles featuring the collector’s edition. The gallery of Pancake, in fact, has been viewed over 8 million times. I’ve already gone over the challenges of promoting a video game special edition, so suffice it to say this unplanned boost was more valuable than any carefully planned tradition effort we could have put forth.

So what’s my point with all of this?

Don’t ask how to make your content go viral.

Ask what your fans and customers love.

Ask how you can talk to them like they talk to each other.

Ask how you can make them something that will make their day more awesome.

Time is the most precious and expensive resource humans have. Make the time people give you worthwhile when they pay attention to your content.

Spend your time and energy figuring out what is valuable to your fans rather than trying to find out how to make them take a specific action in an effort to make something “go viral.”

These efforts pay forward beyond the duration of your campaigns, too. The reddit posts I spoke about resulted in an awesome write up on Mashable about my company’s commendable community and customer service outreach efforts.

And Old Spice? They’re still reaping the benefits of their 2009 campaign. People continue to write about everything they did right back then and what they continue to do right today.

Let’s stop talking so much about viral marketing. Don’t talk about what you want your fans to do in order to make your life better. Talk about what you are going to create to make your fans’ lives better. If you keep doing that, you’ll find your stuff going viral, because you’ll have made something that’s worth everyone seeing.

If you liked this story, please hit the “Recommend” button below — and let me know if you have something else you’d like me to write about. You can also tweet to me @dahanese with questions or comments.