Group Project - Popular ways Things go Viral - Research
Some other research that I set to do was to see how things go viral, or well at least the popular ways in which things go viral. This would really be key to the campaign and how to get it to spread easily, I know if I wanted to be a user i would want it to be as easy as possible to enter a competition so I wanted to find a campaign that we can create that has this, what I like to call Low Effort = High Participation. What does this mean? It means quite literally its super easy to enter the competition(Low Effort) and that means in return we should get a much higher level of participation(High Participation).
The thing was that I still needed some research to further this idea, to make it the best it could be, so. I set about finding some articles online. Here are two that were the most helpful.
http://socialtriggers.com/craft-contagious-content/
http://socialtriggers.com/problem-fast-loading-websites/
Though the second one has a weird title being about websites, it still holds some very good ideas that are easily transferable to our campaign ideas. It has provided some really solid things to think of when making the viral campaign.
Just like the last lot of research I did, I have written an Overview / Conclusion for them and what ideas we can take from the articles and use ourselves.
These provide a lot of good tips and things to think about, the obvious thing is to tweet and use facebook to get things spread quickly, but there is more to it.
We need to use languages or sentences that invoke emotion, stuff that will challenge, cause anxiety or surprise. These get people riled up, thinking and acting quicker. Something like if we ran a competition and then said that you only had until the 29th of October to enter by, we have immediately created anxiety. People will be thinking along the lines of “Oh shoot! I only have until the 29th to enter by. I better tweet this!” Think about it, it’s used a lot and I should imagine is quite successful.
The other thing that this also ties into is, how fast everything acts and that customers are used to everything being fast. So for more effect, slow down. Waiting can be frustrating but if done properly will be very helpful you can make them wait longer but you have to feed them the details and almost pamper them, tell them everything. As an example that it could be used on think of an ATM, despite being quite quick we still stand and wait and it feels like ages. We can’t improve the speed of the ATM what do we do? we tell the customer / user what its currently doing so it could say “printing mini-statement” and something like “Just recounting your money to make sure it’s the right amount”. These small but simple things lessen our perception of time because we think that the ATM is doing something with that time. The knock-on effect is that we are providing a better service and giving feedback to the user.
With these in mind we can generate a campaign that can challenge, shock or induce other emotions to sell the product, if the product can shock or anger people, then people will talk about it. We need to do this through the campaign and it also can cross into the video ideas also.
With this mind-set we can create a campaign that will build up to it's release hopefully creating enough hype to maximise sales and spreading to all of our target audience.
