Social Media Analysis #1 - Going Viral - Social not Medical

I have to write a few blogs on several ted talks for a class I'm taking, so putting them here so I can best understand them and reference them at a later date:

Nguyen, D. 2017. What Makes Something Go Viral? TED Talk. 

Premise

The thesis of this presentation is twofold:

• Anticipation creates virality.  The idea of creating a feeling of a sudden action that hasn't arrived yet will bring a greater degree of interest for any project.
• However, the main part of the presentation was the idea of cultural cartography.  The idea was don't just think about the content, but figure out how it applies what they are thinking and to be able to present it and present it on how is it helping our users do a real job in their lives?

It included this handy, dandy image to show the interrelationship of presenting your content to your audience

It is broken down into the following base categories:

1. Humor
2. This is me (self-deprecating)
3. This is us 
4. It helps you learn something about yourself.

Examples used:

It began is live streaming of goats in BuzzFeed office on their boss.  Because it took time to present, there was a delayed response that increased the audience to 90,000.

They then were followed up with an attempt to duplicate its effect.  They dressed two people in hazmat suits and wrapped rubber bands around watermelons until they popped. This was a facebook live event that included many hits.  they got 800,000 people to watch it successfully.

The main presentation was the use of 32 memes to send to your sister immediately, which apparently had enough 3 million views by taping into the following cultural cartography categories: this is us, connects with family, makes me laugh.

The next presentation was "Pick your footwear and we'll guess your age and height.  This went viral with 55 and up women who were surprised and delightful that they were 28 and 5'9."  It was not accurate, but it empowered their viewers to perform a humblebrag.

We end the examples on the recipe: They wanted to hit the following bubbles: Job - > ingredient - > recipe.  This led to the fudgiest brownies ever that empowered their viewers together on the baking.

Interest and Appeal

I did like the usage of a structure to present data on how it can be used overall in a presentation.

Impact of Talk 

I'm finding a real disconnect in what they are presenting.  The name of the game for their case samples is absurdity more so than social contract and using their cultural cartography as a rationale for their overall results.

To quote from our previous social media best practices, it feels it's emphasis is more so on Awareness and Engagement media, but in its current state, it does little in converting to Conversion metrics.

This is to not say it isn't useful, but rather mostly can be used to generate the first step in any social media presence rather an overall plan.

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So what are your thoughts?

Will this base model work for your own social media presentations.

Feel free to leave a comment below.  I'm curious about your feedback.

#socialmedia #viral #buzzfeed