HAVE YOU EVER BEEN PART OF A VIRAL TREND?

Hey friends, another week, another blog post by me. What are we talking about this week? Trends, Challenges, Campaigns. All that jazz.

My question to you today is, have you ever been part of a viral trend? Because I have. I will get into that later on.

Kaplan and Haenlein gives us a model that suggests if we wanted to spread a virus (viral), it requires five different segments which needs to be considered.

One of my favourite trends that went viral was the “keke do you love me challenge”. To be specific, it was a lyric taken from Drakes song “In My Feelings”. Then a comedian and social media influencer named Shiggy posted the first ever “Kiki Challenge dance video on June 30 encouraging his 1.6 million followers to #DoTheShiggy.” And that is how, within weeks, hundreds of people started doing the Kiki dance.

Even famous people such as Will Smith participated in this viral trend.

Not all videos go viral and create such a buzz around the world, but you may call it just being lucky. No one has control over social media, what is put on it or what becomes popular and not. However with the help of social media and the content that is uploaded can help marketers generate a target audience of which the trend, campaign or challenge can become world wide. For this instance, with the outbreak of this trend, Drake has become more popular and more well known through out the world, as this was the result of one of his songs which created a video that went viral.

So back to Kaplan and Haenlein module, does this sound like successful viral marketing which requires luck and gut feelings? I think so.

Another campaign I will be talking about is the Ice Bucket Challenge.

The power of viral marketing today is agreeing to a common goal and have a vision to create a campaign that a company or organisation can use to reach out to social media to raise awareness but in a more appealing way. This tactic is used more by non for profit organisations.

Kaplan and Haenlein go by the “word of mouth”. Which they believe plays one of the major roles in making a marketing campaign go viral. I am sure you remember the trend of the ice bucket challenge?

Incase you forgot or you don’t know. The Ice Bucket Challenge. It was a campaign to promote awareness of  amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) — also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease and encourage donations for research.

“A person is filmed as a bucket of water and ice is dumped over the individual’s head. The individual then nominates a minimum of three people to do the same thing and finally to make a donation to the Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Association. “

Relating back to lan and Haenlein. This foundation was built and created from word of mouth and supported by social media by creating this challenge, raising awareness and money. Therefore by creating a challenge that supports amyotrophic lateral sclerosis as well as making the challenge fun has thus created viral marketing.

It went viral in August 2014, using social media as a platform to reach a worldwide audience. More than 17 million people posted videos online, including Bill Gates and former president George W. Bush.

So have you ever been a part of viral trend? Leave comments 🙂

Nadia Leonard – Artha