What Makes a Video Go Viral?

Thanks to Head Butler for turning me on to this brilliant anti-bullying video and song from Cypress Ranch High School in Texas.

What’s so great about it? It’s not groundbreaking music or filmmaking. It’s not the first orchestrated high school video or anti-bullying campaign or message.

But it is great viral marketing. A perfect example of viral marketing, in the purest sense of the term. This isn’t selling a product, and no PR team or organized marketing plan tried to create a viral campaign with it.

It’s going viral because it meets all the elusive criteria of viral, and especially the critical component of viral: It’s got a message. A powerful, useful message.

In other words, it’s great content.

These kids didn’t start out trying to create a viral campaign. They started out to get the whole school involved in a project that built a sense of cohesion, community, and connection. They chose a message that had meaning, that resonates with people of all ages, but is never so painfully true as it is when we are in school.

Then they made great content.

Great content has a message. And it’s useful to the consumer of the content. This video is useful because it makes us feel good. Great content can be funny. It can make us cry. But the content that resonates most, and is remembered the longest, is the content that gives us hope. We all need hope, we need to feel good. It’s why aspirational ads work.

This has been true in advertising and marketing for as long as advertising and marketing have existed. Negative ads rarely sell; they leave the viewer feeling crummy, which taints the advertiser’s name. Only in politics do negative ads work according to researchers.

Ironic, isn’t it?

Negative political ads work because they do exactly what this Cypress Ranch High School video decries: They bully. They use rumor, lies, misleading statements and innuendo to divide people, to create enemies rather than stimulate debate.

Maybe we should all keep this video link  handy for the next eight months. We’ll need it.