Viral phenomena or viral sensation are objects or
pattern
A pattern is a regularity in the world, in human-made design, or in abstract ideas. As such, the elements of a pattern repeat in a predictable manner. A geometric pattern is a kind of pattern formed of geometric shapes and typically repeated l ...
s that are able to
replicate themselves or convert other objects into copies of themselves when these objects are exposed to them. Analogous to
the way in which viruses propagate, the term ''viral'' pertains to a video, image, or written content spreading to numerous online users within a short time period.
This concept has become a common way to describe how thoughts, information, and trends move into and through a human population.
The popularity of viral media has been fueled by the rapid rise of social network sites,
wherein audiences—who are metaphorically described as experiencing "infection" and "contamination"—play as passive carriers rather than an active role to 'spread' content, making such content "go viral".
The term ''viral media'' differs from ''
spreadable media'' as the latter refers to the ''potential'' of content to become viral.
Meme
A meme ( ) is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural i ...
s are one known example of informational viral patterns.
History
Terminology
Meme
The word
meme
A meme ( ) is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural i ...
was coined by
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins (born 26 March 1941) is a British evolutionary biologist and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford and was Professor for Public Understanding of Science in the University of Oxford from 1995 to 2008. An ath ...
in his 1976 book ''
The Selfish Gene
''The Selfish Gene'' is a 1976 book on evolution by the ethologist Richard Dawkins, in which the author builds upon the principal theory of George C. Williams's ''Adaptation and Natural Selection'' (1966). Dawkins uses the term "selfish gene ...
'' as an attempt to explain
memetics
Memetics is a study of information and culture. While memetics originated as an analogy with Darwinian evolution, digital communication, media, and sociology scholars have also adopted the term "memetics" to describe an established empirical study ...
; or, how ideas replicate, mutate, and evolve.
When asked to assess this comparison,
Lauren Ancel Meyers, a biology professor at the University of Texas, stated that "memes spread through online social networks similarly to the way diseases do through offline populations." This dispersion of cultural movements is shown through the spread of memes online, especially when seemingly innocuous or trivial trends spread and die in rapid fashion.
Viral
The term ''viral'' pertains to a video, image, or written content spreading to numerous online users within a short time period.
If something goes viral, many people discuss it. Accordingly,
Tony D. Sampson
Tony D. Sampson (born 1964) is a British academic author who writes about philosophies of affect, digital media cultures and labour, marketing power, design/brand thinking, social and immersive user experiences and neurocultures. He is best known ...
defines ''viral phenomena'' as spreadable accumulations of events, objects, and affects that are overall content built up by popular discourses surrounding network culture.
There is also a relationship to the biological notion of disease spread and epidemiology. In this context, "going viral" is similar to an epidemic spread, which occurs if more than one person is infected by a disease for every person infected. Thus, if a piece of content is shared with more than one person every time it is seen, then this will result in viral growth.
In ''
Understanding Media
''Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man'' is a 1964 book by Marshall McLuhan, in which the author proposes that the media, not the content that they carry, should be the focus of study. He suggests that the medium affects the society in whi ...
'' (1964), philosopher
Marshall McLuhan
Herbert Marshall McLuhan (July 21, 1911 – December 31, 1980) was a Canadian philosopher whose work is among the cornerstones of the study of media theory. He studied at the University of Manitoba and the University of Cambridge. He began his ...
describes photography in particular, and technology in general, as having a potentially "virulent nature." In
Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard ( , , ; 27 July 1929 – 6 March 2007) was a French sociologist, philosopher and poet with interest in cultural studies. He is best known for his analyses of media, contemporary culture, and technological communication, as w ...
's 1981 treatise ''
Simulacra and Simulation
''Simulacra and Simulation'' (french: Simulacres et Simulation) is a 1981 philosophical treatise by the philosopher and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard, in which the author seeks to examine the relationships between reality, symbols, and soci ...
'', the philosopher describes ''
An American Family
''An American Family'' is an American television documentary series that followed the life of a California family in the early 1970s. Widely referred to as the first example of an American reality TV show, the series drew millions of weekly vie ...
'', arguably the first "reality" television series, as a marker of a new age in which the medium of television has a "viral, endemic, chronic, alarming presence."
Another formulation of the 'viral' concept includes the term ''media virus'', or ''viral media'', coined by
Douglas Rushkoff
Douglas Mark Rushkoff (born February 18, 1961) is an American media theorist, writer, columnist, lecturer, graphic novelist, and documentarian. He is best known for his association with the early cyberpunk culture and his advocacy of open sourc ...
, who defines it as a type of
Trojan horse
The Trojan Horse was a wooden horse said to have been used by the Greeks during the Trojan War to enter the city of Troy and win the war. The Trojan Horse is not mentioned in Homer's ''Iliad'', with the poem ending before the war is concluded, ...
: "People are duped into passing a hidden agenda while circulating compelling content."
Mosotho South-African media theorist Thomas Mofolo uses Rushkoff's idea to define ''viral'' as a type of virtual
collective consciousness
Collective consciousness, collective conscience, or collective conscious (french: conscience collective) is the set of shared beliefs, ideas, and moral attitudes which operate as a unifying force within society.''Collins Dictionary of Sociolog ...
that primarily manifests via
digital media
Digital media is any communication media that operate in conjunction with various encoded machine-readable data formats. Digital media can be created, viewed, distributed, modified, listened to, and preserved on a digital electronics device. ' ...
networks and evolves into offline actions to produce a new social reality. Mofolo bases this definition on a study about how internet users involved in the Tunisian Arab Spring perceived the value of Facebook towards their revolution. Mofolo's understanding of the viral was first developed in a study on
Global Citizen
Global citizenship is the idea that one's identity transcends geography or political borders and that responsibilities or rights are derived from membership in a broader class: "humanity". This does not mean that such a person denounces or waives ...
's #TogetherAtHome campaign and used to formulate a new theoretical framework called ''Hivemind Impact''. Hivemind impact is a specific type of virality that is simulated via digital media networks with the goal of harnessing the virtual collective consciousness to take action on a social issue. For Mofolo, the viral eventually evolves into McLuhan's '
global village
Global village describes the phenomenon of the entire world becoming more interconnected as the result of the propagation of media technologies throughout the world. The term was coined by Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan in his books '' ...
' when the virtual collective consciousness reaches a point of noogenesis that then becomes the noosphere.
Content sharing
Early history
![Ninety-five Theses (Basel)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/79/Ninety-five_Theses_%28Basel%29.jpg)
Before writing and while most people were illiterate, the dominant means of spreading memes was
oral culture
Oral tradition, or oral lore, is a form of human communication wherein knowledge, art, ideas and cultural material is received, preserved, and transmitted orally from one generation to another. Vansina, Jan: ''Oral Tradition as History'' (1985) ...
like
folk tales,
folk song
Folk music is a music genre that includes #Traditional folk music, traditional folk music and the Contemporary folk music, contemporary genre that evolved from the former during the 20th-century folk revival. Some types of folk music may be c ...
s, and
oral poetry
Oral poetry is a form of poetry that is composed and transmitted without the aid of writing. The complex relationships between written and spoken literature in some societies can make this definition hard to maintain.
Background
Oral poetry is ...
, which mutated over time as each retelling presented an opportunity for change. The
printing press
A printing press is a mechanical device for applying pressure to an inked surface resting upon a printing, print medium (such as paper or cloth), thereby transferring the ink. It marked a dramatic improvement on earlier printing methods in wh ...
provided an easy way to copy written texts instead of handwritten
manuscript
A manuscript (abbreviated MS for singular and MSS for plural) was, traditionally, any document written by hand – or, once practical typewriters became available, typewritten – as opposed to mechanically printing, printed or repr ...
s. In particular, pamphlets could be published in only a day or two, unlike books which took longer. For example,
Martin Luther
Martin Luther (; ; 10 November 1483 – 18 February 1546) was a German priest, theologian, author, hymnwriter, and professor, and Order of Saint Augustine, Augustinian friar. He is the seminal figure of the Reformation, Protestant Refo ...
's ''
Ninety-five Theses
The ''Ninety-five Theses'' or ''Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences''-The title comes from the 1517 Basel pamphlet printing. The first printings of the ''Theses'' use an incipit rather than a title which summarizes the content ...
'' took only two months to spread throughout Europe. A study of United States newspapers in the 1800s found
human-interest, "news you can use" stories and
list-focused articles circulated nationally as local papers mailed copies to each other and selected content for reprinting.
Chain letter
A chain letter is a message that attempts to convince the recipient to make a number of copies and pass them on to a certain number of recipients. The "chain" is an exponentially growing pyramid (a tree graph) that cannot be sustained indefinite ...
s spread by
postal mail
The mail or post is a system for physically transporting postcards, letters, and parcels. A postal service can be private or public, though many governments place restrictions on private systems. Since the mid-19th century, national postal syst ...
throughout the 1900s.
Urban legends
An urban legend (sometimes contemporary legend, modern legend, urban myth, or urban tale) is a genre of folklore comprising stories or fallacious claims circulated as true, especially as having happened to a "friend of a friend" or a family m ...
also began as word-of-mouth memes. Like hoaxes, they are examples of falsehoods that people swallow, and, like them, often achieve broad public notoriety.
CompuServe
Beyond vocal sharing, the 20th century made huge strides in the
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet.
Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web se ...
and the ability to content share. In 1979,
dial-up internet service provided by the company
CompuServ
CompuServe (CompuServe Information Service, also known by its initialism CIS) was an American online service provider, the first major commercial one in the world – described in 1994 as "the oldest of the Big Three information services (the oth ...
was a key player in online communications and how information began spreading beyond the print. Those with access to a computer in the earliest of stages could not comprehend the full effect that public access to the internet could or would create. It is hard to remember the times of newspapers being delivered to households across the country in order to receive their news for the day, and it was when ''
The Columbus Dispatch
''The Columbus Dispatch'' is a daily newspaper based in Columbus, Ohio. Its first issue was published on July 1, 1871, and it has been the only mainstream daily newspaper in the city since ''The Columbus Citizen-Journal'' ceased publication in 19 ...
'' out of Columbus, Ohio broke barriers when it was first to publish in online format. The success that was predicted by CompuServe and the
Associated Press
The Associated Press (AP) is an American non-profit news agency headquartered in New York City. Founded in 1846, it operates as a cooperative, unincorporated association. It produces news reports that are distributed to its members, U.S. newspa ...
led to some of the largest newspapers to become part of the movement to publish the news via online format. Content sharing in the journalism world brings new advances to viral aspects of how news is spread in a matter of seconds.
Internet memes
The creation of the
Internet
The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...
enabled users to select and share content with each other electronically, providing new, faster, and more decentralized controlled channels for spreading memes.
Email forwards are essentially text memes, often including jokes, hoaxes,
email scam
Email fraud (or email scam) is intentional deception for either personal gain or to damage another individual by means of email. Almost as soon as email became widely used, it began to be used as a means to defraud people. Email fraud can take th ...
s, written versions of urban legends, political messages, and digital chain letters; if widely forwarded they might be called '
viral email
A viral email (also known as a "pass-along email") is an email which rapidly propagates from person to person, generally in a word-of-mouth manner. It is an example of a viral phenomenon, which is used for profit in viral marketing, but can also c ...
s'. User-friendly consumer photo editing tools like
Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop is a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe Inc. for Windows and macOS. It was originally created in 1988 by Thomas and John Knoll. Since then, the software has become the industry standard not only in raster ...
and image-editing websites have facilitated the creation of the genre of the
image macro
An image macro is a piece of digital media featuring a picture, or artwork, with some form of text superimposed. The text frequently appears at the top and bottom of the image. Image macros are one of the most common forms of internet memes, an ...
, where a popular image is overlaid with different humorous text phrases. These memes are typically created with
Impact font. The growth of video-sharing websites like
YouTube
YouTube is a global online video platform, online video sharing and social media, social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by ...
made
viral video
A viral video is a video that becomes popular through a viral process of Internet sharing, typically through video sharing websites such as YouTube as well as social media and email.Lu Jiang, Yajie Miao, Yi Yang, ZhenZhong Lan, Alexander Haupt ...
s possible.
It is sometimes difficult to predict which images and videos will "go viral"; sometimes the creation of a new
Internet celebrity
An Internet celebrity (also known as a social media influencer, social media personality, internet personality, or simply influencer) is a celebrity who has acquired or developed their fame and notability through the Internet. The rise of social ...
is a sudden surprise. One of the first documented viral videos is "
Numa Numa", a webcam video of then-19-year-old Gary Brolsma
lip-syncing
Lip sync or lip synch (pronounced , the same as the word ''sink'', short for lip synchronization) is a technical term for matching a speaking or singing person's lip movements with sung or spoken vocals.
Audio for lip syncing is generated thr ...
and dancing to the Romanian pop song "
Dragostea Din Tei
"Dragostea Din Tei" (; official English title: "Words of Love", also informally known as "Maya Hi" and "Numa Numa") is a song by Moldovan pop group O-Zone, released as the second single from their third studio album, ''DiscO-Zone'' (2004). The s ...
".
The sharing of text, images, videos, or links to this content have been greatly facilitated by
social media
Social media are interactive media technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks. While challenges to the definition of ''social medi ...
such as
Facebook
Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...
and
Twitter
Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...
. Other mimicry memes carried by Internet media include
hashtag
A hashtag is a metadata tag that is prefaced by the hash (also known as pound or octothorpe) sign, ''#''. On social media, hashtags are used on microblogging and photo-sharing services such as Twitter or Instagram as a form of user-generated ...
s, language variations like intentional misspellings, and fads like
planking. The popularity and widespread distribution of Internet memes have gotten the attention of advertisers, creating the field of
viral marketing
Viral marketing is a business strategy that uses existing social networks to promote a product mainly on various social media platforms. Its name refers to how consumers spread information about a product with other people, much in the same way tha ...
. A person, group, or company desiring much fast, cheap publicity might create a hashtag, image, or video designed to go viral; many such attempts are unsuccessful, but the few posts that "go viral" generate much publicity.
Types of viral phenomena
Viral videos
Viral videos are among the most common type of viral phenomena. A viral video is any clip of animation or film that is spread rapidly through online sharing. Viral videos can receive millions of views as they are shared on social media sites, reposted to blogs, sent in emails and so on. When a video goes viral it has become very popular. Its exposure on the Internet grows exponentially as more and more people discover it and share it with others. An article or an image can also become viral.
The classification is probably assigned more as a result of intensive activity and the rate of growth among users in a relatively short amount of time than of simply how many hits something receives. Most viral videos contain humor and fall into broad categories:
* Unintentional: Videos that the creators never intended to go viral. These videos may have been posted by the creator or shared with friends, who then spread the content.
* Humorous: Videos that have been created specifically to
entertain people. If a video is funny enough, it will spread.
* Promotional: Videos that are designed to go viral with a
marketing
Marketing is the process of exploring, creating, and delivering value to meet the needs of a target market in terms of goods and services; potentially including selection of a target audience; selection of certain attributes or themes to emph ...
message to raise
brand awareness
Brand awareness is the extent to which customers are able to recall or recognize a brand under different conditions. Brand awareness is one of two dimensions from brand knowledge, an associative network memory model. Brand awareness is a key consi ...
. Promotional viral videos fall under viral marketing practices. For instance, one of the newest viral commercial video – Extra Gum commercial.
* Charity: Videos created and spread in order to collect donations. For instance,
Ice Bucket challenge
The Ice Bucket Challenge, sometimes called the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, is an activity involving the pouring of a bucket of ice water over a person's head, either by another person or self-administered, to promote awareness of the disease amyo ...
was a hit on social networks in the summer of 2014.
* Art performances: a video created by artists to raise the problem, express ideas and the freedom of creativity.
* Political: Viral videos are powerful tools for politicians to boost their popularity.
Barack Obama campaign launche
Yes We Can sloganas a viral video on YouTube. "The Obama campaign posted almost 800 videos on YouTube, and the McCain campaign posted just over 100. The pro-Obama video "Yes we can" went viral after being uploaded to YouTube in February 2008." Other political viral videos served not as a promotion but as an agent for support and unification. Social media was actively employed in the
Arab Spring
The Arab Spring ( ar, الربيع العربي) was a series of Nonviolent resistance, anti-government protests, Rebellion, uprisings and Insurgency, armed rebellions that spread across much of the Arab world in the early 2010s. It began in T ...
. "The Tunisian uprising had special resonance in Egypt because it was prompted by incidents of police corruption and viral social media condemnation of them."
YouTube effect
With the creation of
YouTube
YouTube is a global online video platform, online video sharing and social media, social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by ...
, a video-sharing website, there has been a huge surge in the number of viral videos on the Internet. This is primarily due to the ease of access to these videos and the ease of sharing them via
social media
Social media are interactive media technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks. While challenges to the definition of ''social medi ...
websites. The ability to share videos from one person to another with ease means there are many cases of 'overnight' viral videos. "YouTube, which makes it easy to embed its content elsewhere have the freedom and mobility once ascribed to papyrus, enabling their rapid circulation across a range of social networks."
YouTube has overtaken television in terms of the size of audience. As one example, ''
American Idol
''American Idol'' is an American singing competition television series created by Simon Fuller, produced by Fremantle North America and 19 Entertainment, and distributed by Fremantle North America. It aired on Fox from June 11, 2002, to Ap ...
'' was the most viewable TV show in 2009 in the U.S. while "a video of Scottish woman
Susan Boyle
Susan Magdalane Boyle (born 1 April 1961) is a Scottish singer. She rose to fame in 2009 after appearing as a contestant on the third series of ''Britain's Got Talent'', singing "I Dreamed a Dream" from '.
Boyle's debut studio album, ''I D ...
auditioning for ''
Britain's Got Talent
''Britain's Got Talent'' (often abbreviated to ''BGT'') is a televised British talent show competition, and part of the global ''Got Talent'' franchise created by Simon Cowell. Presented by Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly (colloquially ...
'' with her singing was viewed more than 77 million times on YouTube". The capacity to attract an enormous audience on a user-friendly platform is one of the leading factors why YouTube generates viral videos. YouTube contributes to viral phenomenon spreadability since the idea of the platform is based on sharing and contribution. "Sites such as YouTube, eBay, Facebook, Flickr, Craigslist, and Wikipedia, only exist and have value because people use and contribute to them, and they are clearly better the more people are using and contributing to them. This is the essence of Web 2.0."
An example of one of the most prolific viral YouTube videos that fall into the promotional viral videos category is
Kony 2012
''Kony 2012'' is a 2012 American short documentary film produced by ''Invisible Children'' creators Invisible Children, Inc. The film's purpose was to make Ugandan cult leader, war criminal, and ICC fugitive Joseph Kony globally known so as to ...
. On March 5, 2012, the charity organization Invisible Children Inc. posted a short film about the atrocities committed in Uganda by
Joseph Kony
Joseph Rao Kony (likely born 1961) is a Ugandan militant who founded the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), a Christian fundamentalist organization, designated as a terrorist group by the United Nations Peacekeepers, the European Union and various ...
and his rebel army. Artists use YouTube as their one of the main branding and communication platform to spread videos and make them viral. For instance, after her time off,
Adele
Adele Laurie Blue Adkins (, ; born 5 May 1988), professionally known by the mononym Adele, is an English singer and songwriter. After graduating in arts from the BRIT School in 2006, Adele signed a reco ...
released her most-viewed song
"Hello". "Hello" crossed 100 million views in just five days, making it the fastest video to reach it in 2015. YouTube viral videos make stars. As an example,
Justin Bieber
Justin Drew Bieber ( ; born March 1, 1994) is a Canadian singer. Bieber is recognized for his genre-melding musicianship and has played an influential role in modern-day popular music. He was discovered by American record executive Scooter ...
who was discovered since his video on YouTube Chris Brown's song "With You" went viral. Since its launch in 2005, YouTube has become a hub for aspiring singers and musicians. Talent managers look to it to find budding pop stars.
According to Visible Measures, the original "Kony 2012" video documentary, and the hundreds of excerpts and responses uploaded by audiences across the Web, collectively garnered 100 million views in a record six days. This example of how quickly the video spread emphasizes how YouTube acts as a catalyst in the spread of viral media. YouTube is considered as "multiple existing forms of participatory culture" and that trend is useful for the sake of business. "The discourse of Web 2.0 its power has been its erasure of this larger history of participatory practices, with companies acting as if they were "bestowing" agency onto audiences, making their creative output meaningful by valuing it within the logics of commodity culture."
Viral marketing
Viral marketing is the phenomenon in which people actively assess media or content and decide to spread to others such as making a
word-of-mouth
Word of mouth, or ''viva voce'', is the passing of information from person to person using oral communication, which could be as simple as telling someone the time of day. Storytelling is a common form of word-of-mouth communication where one pe ...
recommendation, passing content through social media, posting a video to
YouTube
YouTube is a global online video platform, online video sharing and social media, social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by ...
. The term was first popularized in 1995, after
Hotmail
Outlook.com is a webmail service that is part of the Microsoft 365 product family. It offers mail, Calendaring software, calendaring, Address book, contacts, and Task management, tasks services.
Founded in 1996 by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smit ...
spreading their service offer "Get your free web-base email at Hotmail."
Viral marketing has become important in the business field in building brand recognition, with companies trying to get their customers and other audiences involved in circulating and sharing their content on social media both in voluntary and involuntary ways. Many brands undertake
guerrilla marketing
Guerrilla marketing is an advertisement strategy in which a company uses surprise and/or unconventional interactions in order to promote a product or service. It is a type of publicity. The term was popularized by Jay Conrad Levinson's 198 ...
or
buzz marketing
Marketing buzz or simply buzz—a term used in viral marketing—is the interaction of consumers and users of a product or service which amplifies or alters the original marketing message. This emotion, energy, excitement, or anticipation about a p ...
to gain public attention. Some marketing campaigns seek to engage an audience to unwittingly pass along their campaign message.
The use of viral marketing is shifting from the concept that the content drives its own attention to the intended attempt to draw the attention. The companies are worried about making their content 'go viral' and how their customers' communication has the potential to circulate it widely. There has been much discussion about morality in doing viral marketing. Iain Short (2010) points out that many applications on
Twitter
Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...
and
Facebook
Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...
generates automated marketing message and update it on the audience's personal timelines without users personally pass it along.
Stacy Wood from
North Carolina State University
North Carolina State University (NC State) is a public land-grant research university in Raleigh, North Carolina. Founded in 1887 and part of the University of North Carolina system, it is the largest university in the Carolinas. The universit ...
has conducted research and found that the value of recommendations from ''everyday people'' has a potential impact on the brands. Consumers have been bombarded by thousands of messages every day which makes ''authenticity'' and ''credibility'' of marketing message been questioned; word of mouth from 'everyday people' therefore becomes an incredibly important source of credible information. If a company sees that the word-of-mouth from "''the average person''" is crucial for the greater opportunity for influencing others, many questions remain. "What implicit contracts exist between brands and those recommenders? What moral codes and guidelines should brands respect when encouraging, soliciting, or reacting to comments from those audiences they wish to reach? What types of compensation, if any, do audience members deserve for their promotional labor when they provide a testimonial."
An example of effective viral marketing can be the unprecedented boost in sales of the
Popeyes
Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen, Inc., also known as Popeyes and formerly named Popeyes Chicken & Biscuits and Popeyes Famous Fried Chicken & Biscuits, is an American multinational chain of fried chicken fast food restaurants that was formed in 1972 ...
chicken sandwich. After the
Twitter
Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...
account for
Chick-fil-A
Chick-fil-A ( , a Word play, play on the American English pronunciation of "wikt:filet#Pronunciation, filet") is an American fast food restaurant chain which is the country's largest which specializes in chicken sandwiches. Headquartered in Coll ...
attempted to undercut Popeyes by suggesting that Popeyes' chicken sandwich wasn't the "original chicken sandwich", Popeyes responded with a tweet that would end up going viral. After the response had amassed 85,000 retweets and 300,000 likes, Popeyes chains began to sell many more sandwiches to the point where many locations sold all of their stock of chicken sandwiches. This prompted other chicken chains to tweet about their chicken sandwiches, but none of these efforts became as widespread as it was for Popeyes.
Financial contagion
In
macroeconomics
Macroeconomics (from the Greek prefix ''makro-'' meaning "large" + ''economics'') is a branch of economics dealing with performance, structure, behavior, and decision-making of an economy as a whole.
For example, using interest rates, taxes, and ...
, "financial contagion" is a proposed socially-viral phenomenon wherein disturbances quickly spread across
global financial markets.
Evaluation by commentators
Some social commentators have a negative view of "viral" content, though others are neutral or celebrate the democratization of content as compared to the
gatekeepers
A gatekeeper is a person who controls access to something, for example via a city gate or bouncer, or more abstractly, controls who is granted access to a category or status. Gatekeepers assess who is "in or out", in the classic words of managem ...
of older media. According to the authors of ''Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture'': "Ideas are transmitted, often without critical assessment, across a broad array of minds and this uncoordinated flow of information is associated with "bad ideas" or "ruinous fads and foolish fashions."
Science fiction sometimes discusses 'viral' content "describing (generally bad) ideas that spread like germs."
For example, the 1992 novel ''
Snow Crash
''Snow Crash'' is a science fiction novel by the American writer Neal Stephenson, published in 1992. Like many of Stephenson's novels, it covers history, linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, religion, computer science, politics, cryptography, ...
'' explores the implications of an ancient
memetic
Memetics is a study of information and culture. While memetics originated as an analogy with Darwinian evolution, digital communication, media, and sociology scholars have also adopted the term "memetics" to describe an established empirical study ...
meta-virus and its modern-day computer virus equivalent:
The spread of viral phenomena is also regarded as part of the cultural politics of network culture or the virality of the age of networks.
Network culture enables the audience to create and spread viral content. "Audiences play an active role in 'spreading' content rather than serving as passive carriers of viral media: their choices, investments, agendas, and actions determine what gets valued."
Various authors have pointed to the intensification in connectivity brought about by network technologies as a possible trigger for increased chances of infection from wide-ranging social, cultural, political, and economic contagions. For example, the social scientist
Jan van Dijk warns of new vulnerabilities that arise when
network society Network society is the expression coined in 1991 related to the social, political, economic and cultural changes caused by the spread of networked, digital information and communications technologies. The intellectual origins of the idea can be trac ...
encounters "too much connectivity." The proliferation of global transport networks makes this model of society susceptible to the spreading of biological diseases. Digital networks become volatile under the destructive potential of computer viruses and worms. Enhanced by the rapidity and extensiveness of technological networks, the spread of social conformity, political rumor, fads, fashions, gossip, and hype threatens to destabilize established political order.
Links between viral phenomena that spread on digital networks and the early sociological theories of
Gabriel Tarde
Gabriel Tarde (; in full Jean-Gabriel De Tarde; 12 March 1843 – 13 May 1904) was a French sociologist, criminologist and social psychologist who conceived sociology as based on small psychological interactions among individuals (much as i ...
have been made in digital media theory by
Tony D Sampson (2012; 2016).
In this context, Tarde's social imitation thesis is used to argue against the
biological deterministic theories of cultural contagion forwarded in
memetics
Memetics is a study of information and culture. While memetics originated as an analogy with Darwinian evolution, digital communication, media, and sociology scholars have also adopted the term "memetics" to describe an established empirical study ...
. In its place,
Sampson Sampson may refer to:
Military
* , several Royal Navy ships
* , several US Navy ships
* Sampson-class destroyer, a World War I US Navy class
* Sampson Air Force Base, near Seneca Lake, New York, closed in 1956
* SAMPSON, a multi-function radar ...
proposes a Tarde-inspired
somnambulist
Sleepwalking, also known as somnambulism or noctambulism, is a phenomenon of combined sleep and wakefulness. It is classified as a sleep disorder belonging to the parasomnia family. It occurs during slow wave stage of sleep, in a state of lo ...
media theory of the viral.
See also
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* (thesis and book ''Virality'')
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References
Further reading
* {{cite book, title=Contagious: Why Things Catch On , first=Jonah , last=Berger , year=2016 , publisher=Simon & Schuster , isbn=978-1451686586
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Internet terminology
Social phenomena
Social influence
Information society
Internet culture
Mass media issues
Influence of mass media