covid makes you cough
Many contagious diseases cause your body to do an involuntary thing like puke or cough or sneeze and this makes transmission of the disease super awesome! The user downloads the virus, then shares.
The common belief about viral content (videos, articles, memes, etc.) is that they are so good, they trigger an involuntary response to share. This isn’t how it works. People aren’t just coughing buzzfeed articles all over their friends faces because of great quality.
Sharing is not involuntary. It’s expensive.
When you share something with friends, coworkers, family, you are making a statement. You’re vouching for the content. You’re attaching it to your name and your reputation. I know, it sounds heavy, but this is what you’re doing each time you share. It’s not the same as liking something in private.
Sharing is a thoughtful response. It’s not involuntary.
Entertainment creators are tool builders not virologists
When I consume a viral video, it is really a social tool. It’s not about how I enjoy the video as much as how much I think the video will help me socially. When I share this, what will it do for me? Maybe it demonstrates…
- my intellegence
- I know about the underground
- my great sense of humor
- my creepy sense of humor
- my deep knowledge of a subject
- where I see myself in society
- that I’m a curator
- a justification of my life choices
To keep this in my mind when creating stuff I imagine the headline “Study finds people with tattoos have higher IQs”
Is everyone gonna share this? No! People dedicated to tattoos who feel marginalized because if it will. People with kids that are heavily tattooed will. People who think they have something funny to say on the topic “If I would have gotten these tats earlier, maybe I would have gotten my GED!”
Nets Level
To go beyond viral is to use the network effect. The network effect means when something is shared, it’s core value increases. If you have a telephone, but nobody you want to talk to has one, your telephone is useless. A phone is for talking to people. The more people there are to talk to, the more valuable the phone gets, this motivates every phone owner to ask more people to get phones. That’s how facebook got big.
The thing that is crucial with this is that it has to be the core value. So, having your friends buy the same car as you, might be fun, but that’s not the network effect. The network effect would be getting more people in your motorcycle gang to buy motorcycles.
You can build the opposite of viral too
If people like what you do want to hoard it, that can hurt your shareability. Let’s say you have a limited capacity venue, your ticket buyers might not want it to get too popular. Or, you could have a live stream where viewers make requests. Their requests are less likely to be picked if the audience is huge.