Going Viral, It’s As Easy As 1,2,3

If you were tasked with the job of making an organisation’s message go viral, what would you do? Where would you start? I was wondering just that the other day, it’s something I think all marketing professionals wonder about and we’d all like to see at least one campaign go crazy (or if we’re honest, all of our campaigns) but the truth is, the fastest way to have a campaign go viral is to take your time. 

There is nothing I find so frustrating as people talking about delivering a social media campaign without planning, investment or consideration.  It makes me groan and my frustration grows because it is based on a misconception that often plagues communications and marketing professionals, the idea that social media is easy and that success is just around the corner if only the marketing manager knew what they were doing.

The truth is successful social media campaigns rely on the same three things that successful traditional media campaigns required. They just happen to be three difficult things for most businesses to deliver. Let’s look at some campaigns that have worked and try to determine what might have pushed them from just viewable to viral.

Who Gives – Humour and the Unexpected

This little gem doesn’t hit the really BIG numbers, but for a relatively inexpensive charitable endeavor, it has managed to capture a fair bit of attention with over 10,500 views and earned traditional media coverage as well. What’s it’s most notable selling feature? A rabbi in a dress of course.

This charity video poses the question, “Who gives?” and then shows Rabbi Avrohom Zeidman performing as a series of characters who run through every imaginable excuse for not giving. Within one week of being posted the 2-minute video played well over 7000 times.

Blendtec – Something You Always Wanted To Do

Blendtec’s, video campaign poses the question, will it blend? What follows is a series of ridiculous items that the blender is challenged to blend. These YouTube posted videos take the premise set out in the old Ginsu knives commercials and add power and imagination. Smartphones, lighters, boron steel and super glue are all put to the test. These videos have gotten millions of views and make up the backbone of Blendtec’s advertising campaign.  The geek factor is high, but you can’t look away.

Old Spice – Surreal and Funny

The Old Spice commercials are among my favourites.  These beauties were popular on television, but they exploded on YouTube with each video getting millions of views.

Not only do the videos use humour to deliver their message, but as the main character moves smoothly from one ridiculous accomplishment to another the viewer is left laughing and a little bewildered.  The best part of these ads is that, like the Axe deodorant ads, they appeal to a younger demographic making them fodder for shares, likes, posts, memes, and quotes.

Although these campaigns each achieved different levels of popularity they do share some things in common. They are quirky, they show imagination and they have broad appeal for a younger demographic. The reality is that for most businesses a successful social media campaign sits closer to the first than the second example, a million views is far from the norm. Even with the accessibility afforded by social media, generating the kind of widespread attention, it takes to be massively popular generally means that you are playing off of traditional media sources, as well as, social media.

Going viral relies on having at least two of the following factors in place, time, money, and creativity. If you don’t have the money, then you definitely need to take your time and show creativity. One social media king we can learn from is a young man originally from Sweden who goes by the name, PewDiePie (Felix Kjellberg). He usually posts two videos a day and is also active on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. He has more than 56 million subscribers on YouTube, and every video he posts generates millions of views. He’s funny,  always irreverent, unexpected, creative, appealing to a younger demographic and most importantly, he is very, very dedicated. He started posting videos in 2009, but it was not until 2012 that he really hit his stride.

Have you ever had a campaign or post go crazy? Do you have any viral ads or videos that you love? What do you think it takes to make a campaign go viral?

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Saturday Morning Chit Chat – Invisibility Cloak, Magic or Mayhem?

invisibility

So I haven’t done one of these in a while and I wasn’t really planning on this one either but how could I resist an invisibility cloak? Yes, that’s right, researchers are getting closer to perfecting the invisibility cloak. I mean, come on, an invisibility cloak AND Google glasses during my lifetime?  I could be Hermione Granger, it’s clearly just a question of time before they hand me a magic wand and a message owl.

For those of you in the know, those clever few who knew that they had tested this technology back in 2006, you could have said something.  If you’re like me and only came across this story in November, WOW!!

Imagine, an invisibility cloak of your very own. Where would you go, what would you see? Imagine the possibilities. Hmm…kinda creepy come to think of it. I mean, where would you go?  What would you want to see that you didn’t want other people seeing you see?  Imagine the disturbing possibilities.

Maybe the invisibility cloak would be better for hiding valuables and not people. Perhaps that should be it’s primary purpose, but you know there’s bound to be someone who wants to slip it on and go somewhere they are not allowed to go and hear, see or learn something they would never be allowed to otherwise. An invisibility cloak would have endless possibilities in military application. It would also be useful for domestic policing. Strangely as I consider the possibilities I’m feeling less like Hermione.

I suppose at this point I should explain how the technology works, but that would completely defeat the purpose. A magic cloak should be…well-magical. There’s also that small detail that they haven’t managed to perfect the technology.  They are exploring it from different angles, but complete invisibility continues to elude researchers. At this stage invisible is really a question of the angle you are standing at and maybe that’s a good thing.

What would you do with an invisibility cloak?

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How Do You Find Opportunity?

How Do You Find Opportunity? - Comm Before The Storm

When I wrote about personal paradigms I explored what causes us to sometimes get preoccupied and blinded by our own perspectives. When I wrote about change, I spoke about how we might manage it, but how do you work to shift your paradigm so that you can manage change? How can we step outside of our perspectives enough to even know that we are being blinded by them?

As noted in my post, The Forever Footprint, I don’t have a natural love of social media.  My transition has been a gradual one. My reluctant engagement started because I could hardly be a communications professional and put my nose up at social media, although you might be surprised to see how many communications people do. I also had a team that was only engaging in social media peripherally. We were crazy busy and social media took a lot of time. It’s deliverables were not always clear and certainly not immediate, so it was easy to ignore. It was also clear that by letting it slide we might be missing opportunities, so we held our annual strategic planning session and determined that we would each tackle a platform. The next six months were interesting to say the least as we each struggled to manage our regular communications duties and embrace this new realm. The articles about social media were interesting, the platforms, well they were another thing all together. They were inconsistent, they were finicky, and they clearly had different strengths, benefits and weaknesses. It was a bit crazy.

Communications has always been a gradually changing sector. Print advertising offered opportunity and hung around for a while before radio ventured out and gave us something new to do.  We had time to grow and adopt to radio before television made its way onto the scene. We had years to figure out television and we played happily between the three mediums for a long time.

Then the explosion occurred.  The platforms started to appear, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, StumbledUpon, YouTube, Reddit, Google+, Triberr, Instagram, Tumblr, Vine  and on and on they go.  It’s little wonder we wanted to back away slowly.  Where to start?  What to do? Every week it seems like there is a new and better way to engage in social media.  I was giving a presentation the other day, Social Media 101, and one of the participants hadn’t heard of LinkedIn. I almost giggled, my relief was so great.  It wasn’t just me, it really was crazy out there.

So how did I get from not wanting to engage to giving advice on social media? Curiosity.  Curiosity will get you past all of your preconceived notions, your impenetrable paradigms and your reluctance to change. Cultivating a curious mind is one of the best things that you can do for yourself. Your curiosity will facilitate professional and personal growth. If you’re in any industry that requires you to engage the public, then feeding your curiosity will provide you with a wealth of opportunity. Even if you like your isolation, unless you are interested in being nothing more than still, curiosity can be satisfied through reading and watching.

Remember, when paradigms in the world around you shift, past success means nothing.  You could be ruling the world as the best advertising rep, but when social media shows up, if you don’t jump on board, your past success will be irrelevant. You’ll be left behind. You could be the best author who ever lived, but if you want new readers, then you have to exist in the new places. You have to open yourself to the possibilities.  When paradigms shift, history doesn’t matter. It didn’t matter that PC dominated the landscape when Apple introduced the iPod.

If you want to know where the new ideas are happening, they are far away from where it’s safe. They are out on the edges where curiosity flourishes and the imagination is in charge.

How do you keep yourself open to opportunity?  Have you ever found yourself fighting against something you later embraced?

 I’m looking for your communications stories. Have you ever had something go horribly wrong or amazingly right because of a little communications?  Please share your story here as a guest blogger.  For more information, please see my post, Everybody Loves A Good Story.

 

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8 Tips For Managing Workplace Bullies

I’ve never had much patience for bullies and I’ve never thought bullying was someone else’s problem.  Though they were a feature of childhood, somehow I expected that bullies would make fewer appearances in my life as I grew older, so imagine my surprise when I encountered bullies in the workplace.

I can remember one boss who would yell at the top of his lungs at any and everyone. He would start at one end of our very long one-story building and scream as he marched his way down the central hallway to the other end.  He was like some crazed long-haired bull.  His face would get redder and redder as the target of his rage became smaller and smaller. It was pretty awful. It was my first real job and as the receptionist, I sat in the centre of the building able to watch the whole horrible scene unfold from beginning to end. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough, which is one of the first impacts the bully has on the workplace. They destroy morale and make people leave.

When I encountered bullies again it was part of the organization’s culture.  It was like entering an alternate dimension where bad behaviour was acceptable and being considerate and polite was a thin veneer worn for public consumption. Thrown chairs, tossed telephones, fist fights in the office and threats riddled with obscenities delivered across the boardroom table, were all part of the weekly operations.  This is the second impact of bullying in the workplace, if left unchecked, it becomes part of the work culture.

Your average garden variety bully has gotten away with their behaviour largely because no one has called them on it. Through intimidation and threats, they have managed to make their way through life and work with no one stopping them. What the rest of us have to figure out is what do we want to do with them, defuse them, ignore them or avoid them.

Here are some things that have worked for me.

  1. Build your network. Don’t let the bully make you feel isolated. Engage your colleagues; give yourself the opportunity to have fun. I have found that eventually, it is the bully who gets left out of activities unless they can behave.
  2. Ignore them. Yup, simply act as if they don’t matter or don’t exist. A non-responsive target isn’t all that interesting to many bullies, a bit like picking on a door.
  3. Avoid them. If you don’t have to engage them, then don’t.  Life is short enough without wasting time on people who don’t know how to behave.
  4. Rephrase. I got into the habit of rephrasing dumb or aggressive requests so that the person delivering them would look foolish confirming the comment or request. “Get me some lunch.” Would get repeated as, “So you want me to postpone the bosses report so that I can get you a sandwich?”
  5. Stay calm. There is nothing quite as disconcerting to a screamer as someone who simply doesn’t rise to the hysteria. By staying calm you also stay in control and demonstrate a level of emotional intelligence that generally shuts down the bully.
  6. Document the bullying. One of my buddies had a terrible bully for a boss.  One afternoon my friend called me close to tears, her boss had sent her a particularly inflammatory email. I told her to forward the email to her boss’ superior with a brief sentence explaining that the tone and language were not acceptable professional behaviour. Her boss was fired by the end of the week.
  7. Tell them to stop. Simply tell them to stop. Tell them you feel bullied or harassed, that their tone, language or manner makes you uncomfortable.
  8. Get out.  Unfortunately, there are situations that can’t be helped and in those cases, your best bet is to make a run for it.

Have you ever had to manage a bully? What do you do to deal with bullies?

 

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Lies

Lies

Any number of people might assume that I lie for a living. Public relations people are often asked (mistakenly) to spin bad news into good. It’s kinda like asking someone to spin straw into gold. I have yet to meet a communications person who could alter the outcome of news by using more pleasant words. No matter how good, bad or indifferent the news, you can’t change its impact by using clever language. Using rightsizing instead of downsizing doesn’t stop anyone from losing a job. Financial restraint instead of financial trouble, doesn’t give you more money. In fact, this kind of sanitization makes people want to roll their eyes and walk away.

There are occasions however when a lie can have a soothing or calming effect. When it’s easier all round to lie in order to get out of a difficult social situation. There are points in my work day when I simply don’t see any choice in the matter. Faced with a colleague who I will happily chat away thirty minutes of my day with if I answer honestly, “yes I’d love a coffee” then I may respond with a no. Or there are those times when in response to a query from a concerned co-worker I nod my assurances that her pink polka dot dress doesn’t look that bad. I cringe as I head back to my office, but have probably avoided an extended period of distraction as she tries to determine if a sweater, belt or anything makes the polka dots better or worst. These lies generally make our social interactions run smoothly.

For most of us when we are put on the spot and feel we have to make up a lie to get out of an awkward social situation, we struggle.  We scramble around looking for something to say.  We run through a series of disconnected thoughts in our head trying to come up with something to say that might be believed. It takes us time and the more time it takes the more awkward the situation becomes. Good liars or habitual liars on the other hand are very good at producing their lies on the spot.  They can quickly analyze the situation and run through plausible scenarios and ideas at top speed until they reach an effective lie.

Like most things in life the context matters.  When a good liar is getting out of an awkward social situation you may laugh over their efforts or even appreciate their finesse.  When a good liar applies their skills to undermine your work then it’s not so funny. Most of us have encountered a liar at work, the liars who lie because it makes them look good or gets them out of trouble. Someone who doesn’t think twice about claiming the work of a colleague as their own and who won’t hesitate to explain that they had no idea that a project was due that day, although they were given the deadline several times. These folks are problematic not just because what they do is inherently unfair, but they also engender a great deal of discontent among colleagues, creating any number morale challenges. If they are successful at work and are given recognition they didn’t earn, or worst still, a position of authority, they send all the wrong messages to the rest of the organization.

If you have ever encountered anyone like this in the work setting you probably want to know how you can avoid them in the future. The good news is that there are a number of tips and hints out there on how to spot a liar. The bad news is that most of them would require intensive training in micro-expressions which once accomplished may still prove useless. While micro-expressions can tell us what someone is feeling they don’t tell us why they are feeling it?  You can learn to correctly interpret fear, anger or surprise but that doesn’t mean you know why someone is feeling it. Micro-expressions are micro because they are fleeting.  They may be a result of the conversation you are having or they may be a consequence of a passing thought that is completely unrelated to the conversation.

Harvard Business School professor, Deepak Malhotra and his colleagues from the University of Wisconsin, Associate Professor Lyn M. Van Swol and doctoral candidate Michael T. Braun offer an interesting alternative.  They look at liars based on linguistic cues in their paper, Evidence for the Pinocchio Effect: Linguistic Differences Between Lies, Deception by Omissions, and Truths, published in the journal Discourse Processes.

In brief they suggest looking for these cues if you think you’ve got a liar on your hands.

Liars are chatty: Liars use more words .Van Swol called this “the Pinocchio effect.” The more they lied the more words they needed to make the lie seem real.

Liars by omission are more abrupt: Perhaps they are trying to avoid blurting out the truth, but liars by omission like to keep their answers short and to the point

Liars swear: Compared to most people, liars use more swear words. It’s as if their filter fails in this area because they are working so hard fabricating in other parts of their brain. If ever you needed a reason to stop swearing, this is a great one.

Liars speak in the third person: Maybe because their telling a story, maybe because they need some space between themselves and the lie.

Liars use complex sentences: So not only do they say more, they say it in really complicated ways.

Told any whoppers? Ever have someone tell you a blatant lie? Take credit for your work? I’d love to hear your comments.

Quick Reminder, I’m inviting stories on communications for my blog.  For more information, check out last weeks post, Everyone Loves A Good Story.

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