That title is a joke in case you were wondering. Some people have formulas and such for getting things to go viral, but really no one has any clue how anything goes viral.
That Old Spice campaign last week in Portland? I don’t get it, but it went viral.
I do some social media stuff for The Mentoring Project and yesterday one of our tweets on Twitter went viral. I’ve seen things get retweeted (think of this as sharing what someone else said for those of you who don’t use Twitter) 20 times and thought it was getting a big push. Yesterday I set up @tmproject for a tweet in the morning, and it got retweeted over 500 times. Make that over 700 times (and growing) between Twitter’s standard retweet and the old school retweet.
I could explain why in this instance so many people got behind a statistic, but why people got behind this instead of the hundreds of other things we’ve done over the last 6 months is beyond me. It helped that two Twitter users with a large following retweeted us and that led many others to as well. But we didn’t ask for anyone to get behind this. This is the part of social media I’ll never understand or be able to predict.
A lot of times art only makes complete sense to the artist.
Going viral on social media is kind of like that. It doesn’t make much sense.
Everyday great things get overlooked and important things are missed, while the opposite gets glorified.
I’m just glad that yesterday more people were made aware of the fatherless epidemic that we can do something about through mentors.
Any thoughts on how things go viral?
