THE 4 INGREDIENTS

ADDITIONAL READING

002 OF VIRALITY
BY JAMES SHAMSI

GOING VIRAL ISN’T ROCKET

SCIENCE.
You essentially need just these 4 things:

1. Emotion - This is simple, yet so often overlooked. If the

“
content doesn’t evoke any emotion and you simply feel
indifferent to a campaign or video, why the hell would
you share it? You wouldn’t, and neither would anyone
else. The type of emotion you cause is entirely up to
you, and you can repurpose the same content to create
You must realize
different types of emotions - making them more suitable that the major
for blogs you otherwise wouldn’t have pitched these to
(we’ll go into this in more detail later). publishers will
2. Be Innovative - Have an innovative, or surprising only write about
component to your campaign.
you if the editors
3. Be On Trend - Try to identify what’s being talked about feel your content
currently in the media, what the buzz is, and creatively

”
integrate it into your campaign. will get people to
4. Click Potential - Content Is NOT King, click potential click.
is. Though content goes viral organically all the time
(via people just sharing content through friends and
never through people finding content through blogs and
publishers), this happens very rarely… and when it does
it’s on a much smaller scale than otherwise, i.e. 50,000
views on a YouTube video. However, if you get blogs
and publishers to write about you, you can enter the
mainstream and start getting millions of views.

You must realize that the major publishers will only write about
you if the editors feel your content will get people to click.
Remember - major publishers are looking for ways to maximize
clicks and views for them. Because of this, they’re not going to write about you if your content
doesn’t have any of the 4 characteristics above. They’re going to be evaluating your content for ‘click
potential’. Even if what you’ve done fits all 3 characteristics, you need to hit them strongly enough to
make it worthwhile to be written about according to click potential.

EXAMPLE: #KARDBLOCK
Take one of my recent
personal projects, #KardBlock,
as an example. #KardBlock
is a Google extension that
deletes any mention of the
Kardashians from your internet
experience. This project has all
3 components. It’s innovative,
in that nothing like this had
ever been done before, and it
was very much on trend - with
the Kardashians ‘trending’ on
Facebook and Twitter pretty much every day. With just these 2 factors it has massive potential already.
Editors won’t be scared to push out another Kardashian article - because they already know it will get
clicks. Given this feeling of safety in clicks it will be much more likely to get written about. With regards
to emotion, I angled this in many ways. To entertainment bloggers I sent emails from alias accounts
talking about ‘this loser hater who’s creating this thing called #KardBlock’, to other blogs I emailed with
the angle of ‘finally a hero to save us from Kardashians’, and I continued to change angles for different
types of blogs.

Ultimately, this meant that everyone talked about it, why? Because the editors also realized it ticked all
3 categories for their readers, meaning that they too get what they ultimately need - clicks. It’s really
clicks that determine how viral you go. It’s unlikely content goes viral without articles being written
(though this happens on a much smaller scale, which I wouldn’t consider ‘viral’), so in many ways
content is not king, but potential for clicks is.

EXAMPLE: #FREETHENIPPLE
#FreeTheNipple is a campaign fighting against
female nipple inequality on Instagram - in that
women are not allowed to post bare-chested
photos, but men are. I noticed that this nipple
inequality was being written about more and more
(meaning it thus had strong ‘Click Potential’), so I
made it my mission to find a way to create a viral
idea around this. I Googled ‘male moobs’ and found
a male chest that could be mistaken for that of a
female. I then cropped these so only the nipples
were available and uploaded these to instagram,
using the hashtag #FreeTheNipple. However, given
that there were so many nude posts on Instagram
with this hashtag, I knew it would take weeks for my
post to get moderated. I’m impatient, so I decided
to speed things up. How? I went on LinkedIn and
found all the community managers on LinkedIn,
 then found their Instagram profiles and tagged them in my picture. The result? My picture got deleted
that same day. I then emailed this case study to journalists, and the next day I was published on sites
like The Daily Dot, Huffington Post, Daily Mail and more.

So why did this work? It was innovative - nothing like this had been done before, it was on trend (and
so had high click potential), and it evoked emotion (of anger/surprise at Instagram, especially as they
then predictably reinstated my photo and did a press release just for this).

EXAMPLE: #HIREJAMES
When I first moved to LA a year
ago I knew I had to network to get
offered a job in growth hacking
and social media. So, I decided to
speed up the process and growth
hack myself with the #HireJames
stunt. This involved me essentially
uploading my resume in 3 parts as
a pictures on Tinder. I was hoping I’d get hired by somebody who’d appreciate my creativity...but I also
wanted to see if I could make this go viral. Now, I only kept this Tinder profile active for about a minute
because I wanted to know with full certainty that it went viral because of my efforts, and nothing else.
It was a personal challenge, if you will. The result? Coverage on all the major publishers, from Elite
Daily, The Washington Post to The Huffington Post and dozens of others. So why did this work? Firstly,
it was innovative, and was a surprising use of a platform that was much talked about and ingrained in
pop-culture - thus, messaging screenshots of my stunt was easy to feed to journalists who wrote about
Tinder recently.

james.shamsi@gmail.com