How do these things go viral?
Online Epidemics, Memes, Disruptive Social Media Viral, the Future of Marketing.
From the erotic dance of “one corner”, to how the “The Ting Goes Skrrrrrrrrrah Pap Pap Kak Kak Kak”, and now the “‘Take Your Car On A Date’ Meme”, all in one month. Is there anything for businesses to learn from these ridiculous challenges and memes on how to gain attention in our busy world?
Clearly old model of publicity is failing. Social epidemics have a new model that no one has really researched upon.There has to be a consistent statistical correlations and sequential permutations on how they started right down a time series of becoming a trend. Maybe it’s not too early to jump start a hypothesis that may lead to a socio-scientific theory relevant to the market place.
Business might find something from the trends worth re-using. I said to my team at Hexavia last week, “As marketing and management consultants, I need us to research and find the DNA of viral concepts. Like cell study in biotechnology, if you apply nanotechnology into zooming of a cell, you can alter and recreate life. That’s where 3D printing and cloning of human parts and bio-genetics is coming from.
Same way, anyone who masters DNAs of how these trends go viral can duplicate it and I am sure there are millions we can make from it.
Still unknown to a lot of people, big budget for campaigns, and ads are failing and contagiousness is replacing mainstream marketing, how well do you know them?
You can as well shrink your corporate communications department to make room to the new dynamics of mind control. In a world of information overload, being crazy and different has never had a more potent vibe than ever. And with too much ads everywhere plus social media, as the world gets to the breaking point of information overload, the future of business moves away from marketing and goes back to the value of the “stickiness wow factor’, driven by word of mouth, clicks of the clicks and the power of friend of a friend’s friend. Plus people just seem to be attracted to what is not normal.
PR depends no more on corporate communication but on the value and stickiness of the message, the context of the message and the quality of the channels that carries it (which must satisfy The Law of The Few. This states that for a message to go viral, it must be differently sticky and initiated by a small select group of people categorized into mavens (experts), sneezers (broadcasters/platforms with large but targeted followers of like minds), connectors (socialites and networkers) or all put together.
We can see this fulfilled with the Mannequin challenge, the “one corner” dance, to how the “The Ting Goes Skrrrrrrrrrah Pap Pap Kak Kak Kak”, and now the “‘Take Your Car On A Date’. But are they just accidental or is there a trend to learn from so it can be duplicated intentionally for a cause as a new form of selling without formalized marketing?
