Staying Viral: The Endurance of Trends
By Cassey Deveau
Do you remember any movies you watched as a kid? Try and picture one of the best scenes. In my mind, I just envisioned the Spice Girls walking through a very foggy wooded area, huddled together and holding bright white flashlights. Then they see the spaceship in front of them and Ginger screams “Oh my god run for it!” and Baby Spice screams “I can’t move!” as the spaceship moves closer and closer to the group, wind whipping through their 90s hairstyles. I honestly haven’t seen this movie since the early 2000s. And with the exception of memes from the scene that I use on the regular, I haven’t watched the clip in at least a decade. Somehow though, the picture is so fresh in my mind.
Across an office, there are usually employees from different generations. Being a fresh graduate, I’m used to being one of the youngest people in any office I’ve worked at. This leads to a lot of fun conversations where my colleagues go “wait you were born in WHAT year?” Followed by stories of what they were doing at the time (usually something way more interesting than potty training). This gap can lead to some great learning experiences, shared stories, and conversations about the past. However, one con to the age gap is that I frequently feel like I’m missing out on inside jokes, and I rarely recognize things that they say were trending during this era that I missed.
This happened to me last month when someone made a joke about “rickrolling” — something I’d never heard of before. Everyone was so surprised that I didn’t recognize what was described as “one of the biggest internet sensations” during its peak time. I figured that it might just have been one of those trends that didn’t last long enough for me to catch.
I decided to do a mini experiment via my Instagram story to see how many of my followers knew what rickrolling was. When only presented with the question: Have you heard of rick rolling? 68% of respondents said no. When presented afterwards with a visual, a photograph from the hit Never Gonna Give You Up music video used in the rickrolling trend, and the question “Do you know what it is now?”, 61% said yes. Now, I recognize that this is far from perfect science, and my research methods professor would be shaking her head at my lack of variable control. But I still think that there’s an important lesson to be learned from this poll.
If you love creating content, like myself, you’ve probably noticed that it’s become increasingly difficult to get an audience engaged. It’s also become increasingly difficult to get people to remember the content we push out to them. People are bombarded with so many pieces of messaging per day, between texts, Tweets, Instagram stories, Snapchats, and pop-up ads. The retention of messages is at an all time low. How can our audience remember any one piece of content when they see so much of it each day?
A lot of companies are doing a great job in putting quality over quantity. Brands are trying to create an identity, and to create content that will not only get attention, but will drive home their brand identity in the minds of their audience. But in one year, five years, or ten years, will people remember that content? Will they still associate it with those brands?
Many organizations put a huge emphasis on content campaigns taking off, or going viral. We frequently consider it a content creation success if the piece garners a ton of likes, or shares. How can you find success in trending beyond your fifteen seconds of fame with this type of quick, like-focused content?
The difference is in the visuals. Messages that are presented with a form of visual content resonate deeper with any audience, and a lot of it has to do with the science behind how our brains process information.
I recently attended a webinar on visual storytelling, where I learned that 90% of the information sent to the brain is visual. The brain also processes visual information 60,000 times faster than text. We retain 95% of a message when it’s in video, but we only retain 10% when it’s laid out as text.
Looking at those numbers it’s easy to see that if we want memorable content, visuals have to be a key focus in our content distribution strategies. Even if your current KPIs are outlined in a way that you need to increase likes and shares to measure your success, using strong visual content will have a positive effect on those numbers. If that isn’t enough to convince you, maybe this will be:
If you hear a piece of information, three days later you will only remember 10%. If a photo is added to that information it increases recall up to 65%.
So take the time to create attention-grabbing, brand-identifying, unique visual content, and you’ll be able to do more than just go viral, you’ll stay viral.
VERB Interactive is a leader in digital marketing, specializing in solutions for the travel and hospitality industry. Find out more at www.verbinteractive.com.
