Going Viral — Is there a formula?
I’ve been fascinated by the way some online content goes viral, while so much doesn’t. Is there a pattern to these, similar to viral diseases in real life? Or is it genuinely random and unpredictable? If there is a pattern, there may be a science. And if there’s a science, shouldn’t we be able to create a viral “epidemic” from scratch?
To investigate, I dissected a few of the most famous examples of viral content from the last few years. I wanted to know if there were any common elements to their biology.
The four cases I selected were very different in nature. There was the “Ice Bucket Challenge” — the charity awareness phenomenon that raised over $100 million for the ALS Foundation. “The Dress” (is it blue and black, or white and gold?), a wild card that accumulated 10 million tweets in the first week alone. The Korean singer Psy’s “Gangnam Style”, which with 2.9 billion views, stands as the world’s most successful YouTube video of all time. And the mobile game juggernaut “Pokémon Go” — the first to reach the heights of 21 million daily active users.
As radically different as these cases are, I did find some common factors that played a part in each going viral. I’ve visualised these as the “Bajaj Viral index”, with cells replicating in four directions from a central nucleus. The four segments are: Emotion, Quality, Timing and Strategy; and the nucleus is the idea of Participation. Together they create the virus and help it survive, thrive and spread organically from one person to another.
EMOTION: Feeling it and needing to share it. Whether it’s the surprise at the fact that two people can look at the same thing and see something completely different (The Dress); or the joy in catching that elusive Wartortle that’s been evading you for the last hour in Pokémon Go.
QUALITY: The elements that help rack up multiple engagements from individuals. The innovative features built into Pokémon Go via augmented reality technology, or the creativity in the Ice Bucket challenge videos that made them so distinctive and memorable.
TIMING: Why now? One event could set it all in motion, such as the catchy Gangnam Style revealing K-Pop and Korean culture to the rest of the world. Or unearthing something that you feel deserves more attention, as in the Ice Bucket challenge and its support for ALS.
STRATEGY: Planning for maximum engagement. Of the four featured cases only Pokémon Go had a viral strategy built into its DNA. The others had an element of chance to thank for their success, with no guiding hand orchestrating their mass appeal. Pokémon Go’s distribution, platforms, exclusivity and markets were all considered in advance for maximum effectiveness at launch.
So how important is strategy, if viral success is clearly possible without it? Plotting a Google trends analysis over the last 5 years may help answer that question.
The graph shows that searches and mentions for Pokémon Go dwarf those of the other three viral phenomena. The Ice Bucket challenge, Gangnam Style and the Dress all have impressive statistics to back up their viral status, but Pokémon Go was able to reach heights far above that of the others. The game may have been based on a familiar and established property, but it was a meticulous and dynamic strategy that underpinned the degree of viral success enjoyed by Pokémon Go.
There may not be a “perfect” formula to creating a viral phenomenon, but the role of strategy in driving peak engagement may be the most valuable lesson we can learn here.
