“… make a viral video!”

Any variation of the above brief (if you can even call it that) is a clear ringer that the idea you’ve put on the table has gone over the head of the decision-makers and the project is about to go downhill.

Let’s get one thing straight – you cannot ‘make’ viral content.

While marketers and advertisers can whip out the number of followers, subscribers, shares, view counts or impressions (paid promotions notwithstanding) and peddle them as ‘viral success’, feel free to get carried away with them but please do not insult other people’s intelligence by expecting them to join the said proclamation. These metrics are an indication of how popular the content was, and true popularity itself is a laudable achievement no doubt, but that’s not the same thing as a ‘viral’.

For something to go viral, it needs to have as the name suggests, a virus-like quality – easy to catch and highly contagious. Unless the content in question develops a mind and nature of its own, mutating and replicating itself in the masses, it’s not viral. Till it spawns memes, fan pages, cosplays, iterations, spoofs, Reddit discussions, inane hashtags, entries into the urban dictionary, and finds its way into stand up acts, speeches and everyday verbiage, it’s not viral. As long as the paid media behind your content is more than the earned media, it’s not viral. Period.

There’s another kind of viral content, the annoying kind, the eyesores and earworms that get stuck in your head. Like a bad song from an artist, you’ve been insulting all your life but can’t stop humming one particularly embarrassing piece from them on a given day. You might not pass it on like a virus, but the content, for all you might want to judge it, has hit a home run. Brands have used this to good effect but this too is more a matter of chance and cannot be planned or predicted. At least I hope not. That’s like a couple deciding to “make ugly babies so more people can come to visit us out of sheer curiosity”.

Truly viral content does not need any metrics and graphs to prove itself. That sweet taste of success will be self-evident in the trends, chatter and sometimes embarrassingly unrecognisable and lawsuit level murders of your content across platforms. With loyalists, haters and competition chipping in for some good old fashioned pride of association. This is when you can claim bragging rights to having anything to do with content that was deemed truly viral by the only yardstick that matters – the audience.

The ice bucket challenge deserves a mention here, albeit a dubious one. I don’t know how successful it actually was in helping the cause it championed, but as a viral communication, it hit all the right notes. A call to action, undertaking behavioural effort with a coded process and enough room to improvise. An unsaid contest started by recognisable faces, handed down to the masses with everybody trying to better the other person. Most importantly, with a socio-moral purpose underpinning the intent index of the whole campaign, high ground was created for the participants, justifying the otherwise embarrassing and avoidable act of drenching yourself on camera, in public, and looking delighted about it.

I’ve always maintained the Ice Bucket challenge as intentionally alright but extremely suspect in action because, water! Clean water is precious and we’re wasting it for likes and self-gratifying digital pissing contests. I’ve seen people use trucks and cranes and planes to make their video better, wasting millions of gallons of water in the process sending the carbon footprint of the campaign itself to levels where it offsets any actual benefits to the original cause in the first place. This, in addition to the fact that there were far more videos than actual donations towards the discovery of a cure; that was the raison d’existence of this whole undertaking in the first place!

In quest of that holy grail of digital marketing, what brands and businesses can and should do is focus on making relevant, engaging and rewarding content that creates real emotional value for the customers over and above the transactional one. Messaging that’s high on empathy and reflects the pulse, tone and mood of the socio-economic spectrum and a very cluttered market. Communication that’s aligned with the product or service offering, not just in name but at the very core of the value promise and user journey. Design that comes from data, insight and courage, backed by technology and contributing to the monetisation engine of the business. Campaigns that talks less, do more and sell even lesser.

These are things you can and should plan, prioritise and control. But don’t forget to pray, and pray hard that somewhere, amidst the vast audience your paid media, post boosts and personal networks have covered, there is at least one individual with a perfect balance of twisted humour, vivid imagination and sufficient internet followers to help enshrine your brand in the popular culture universe of the day.

Or just pray for sheer dumb luck.