Going viral

Many bloggers would give their right arm to be able to write posts that are widely read. In a painfully truthful Winston Churchill parody, Katie Hafner recently declared that 'never has so much been written by so many, to be read by so few.' For many, blogging is a little like whistling into the wind. It's quite a lonely existence when you write, and write and post your ideas .... but no-one ever reads it. It has to be acknowledged that many bloggers write more for their own benefit than they do as public performance. For them, it is an online diary of their thoughts, exploits and musings which can be eavesdropped on by anyone who happens to be passing by. If someone takes the time to comment, it is a bonus. 


For many other bloggers, this isn't enough, and they write for an intended audience, hoping their posts will be read by a lot of people. It can be soul destroying when it appears that no-one is reading your finely crafted blog post. The metrics of success for most bloggers are the number of views, likes and favourites a post attracts. Then there is the pure gold dust of comments.  Added bonuses can be realised when fellow bloggers think your content is good enough to syndicate on their own sites, or when they translate it into another language or otherwise repurpose it before representing it on their own sites. This results in an amplification of your ideas, but usually, it won't happen unless you license your content for free sharing and repurposing (see my Creative Commons licence at the bottom of this post). 


The ultimate for many aspiring bloggers though is if one of their posts to 'goes viral'. Now, this is a much vaunted and often spoken term on the Web, but do we actually know what it means, or what the causes are of content that goes viral? Viral content is content that becomes quickly popular when it is shared by many across social media platforms. Viral videos on YouTube have included LOLcats, the Numa Numa song (with more than 17 million hits, this video made Gary Brolsma into an Internet star virtually overnight), the Star Wars Kid (> 24 million hits), Charlie Bit Me (close to 400 million views), and on the more serious side, Mike Wesch's videos on internet culture such as 'The Machine is Us/ing Us' (Over 11 million views) Such content takes on a life of its own, and in Web parlance becomes a 'meme'. If a video has a strong message, or is amusing or in some way breaks the mould, it is easy to see how it can attract so many views in such a relatively short period of time. All of the above videos had one or both of those characteristics. More importantly, viral content has the capability to spread the influence of its contained message widely across the community. Many corporations and large organisations have spent a considerable amount of resources and effort trying to replicate the success of such viral content to promote their products. Viral marketing is the holy grail of advertising.

So exactly what does it take for content to go viral? The advice from one website is that content has to exhibit 3 characteristics to go viral. The content has to solve a problem, create interest and er... have 'interesting stuff' contained within it. Even if we merge the last two together (they are that similar), it's a bit of a no-brainer to see that any content that solves and problem and piques interest is going to be attractive to visitors. Other commentators swear that plug-ins and other software is the secret to viral content. Some more sensibly suggest that it is persistence and a cultivating of fine writing abilities, that over a period of time, will enable the blogger to be in a position to write content that has the potential to go viral.

I think the secret of viral content can be a lot more prosaic than this though. One of my recent posts entitled 'Fire and Brimstone' has since it was written in September attracted over 33,000 views. I don't think it is a particularly significant post, and although it deals with a mildly controversial subject (attitudes about the value of blogging) it is nothing special. It is certainly not in my estimation, worthy of consistently attracting over 10,000 views each calendar month. The secret to its success I believe, lies in the image I used (I always include an evocative image at the top of each of my blog posts) - which I have included on this page. The image is a free stock image of fire. Tracking back through all the blog traffic I receive on the Fire and Brimstone post, I can see that most arrive after searching for 'fire' on Google. Clicking one of the images on the search results will take you directly to my blog post. I'm not sure how it has happened, but this I believe, is the reason I receive so much traffic on that single blog post. It's all about the image. Below, you may also see the link to my blogpost in the top ten Google search results, depending on where you are searching from in the world.

As a result of this image, the blog post has, in a small way, gone viral. It's none of my doing, other than the fact that I chose an evocative image which has since become associated with my blog and then been linked to it. The key message is, that although you cannot ensure that any content you create and share will be widely read, there are occasions when, through persistence, and through being in the right place at the right time, you can give your content a great chance of success.

Image source


Going viral by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.