White And Gold Or Black And Blue?

How often does a dress go viral? We have seen some very impressive dresses that hit the headlines from the recent Oscar award event, like Lupita Nyong’o’s Oscars 2015 Calvin Klein dress. However, that excitement was surpassed 3 days ago when a picture was posted to Tumblr of a dress that became known by its hashtag, #TheDress. The big question that the world was posed was “white and gold or black and blue? Which combination was it? What did you see? What did I see? Did you care? Nevertheless on Friday 27th February that dress, whatever color you thought it was, went viral.

#TheDress That Broke The Internet

I analyzed the speed of the social media viral spread. There was minimal activity on the 26th February at 17.00 CET but then the social media buzz went viral, resulting in over 1 million mentions by 23.00 CET that night. It was still very topical but steadily dropping in the frequency of mentions to just over 160K mentions by the early morning of the 28th.

[Tweet “#TheDress That Broke The Internet – White And Gold Or Black And Blue? @Jedi_roach”]

#TheDress was so topical at its peak that ABC News ran a story on it on February 27th at 11:45 AM ET and was one of many news stations to feature a story about it.

#TheDress Hashtag

#TheDress went viral very quickly. The hashtag was attracting 3,500 retweets per hour and 3.83 million potential views per hour. It was associated with many other fun hashtags like #dressgate and many that I care not to mention!

The Sentiment

Viral stories can of course be negative or positive, and I found that #TheDress phenomenon was mildly negative but in a fun way. For example, one of the most mentioned Twitter accounts in tweets about #TheDress was @specsavers. I noticed a lot of banter about eye sight quality and I noticed a serious post by the UK National Health Service which encouraged people to find out about common visual problems like color vision deficiency.

Content Marketing Goes Out The Window?

“#TheDress has gone viral… get our response out there”. How many social media managers heard that on Friday 27th? The viral phenomenon was breaking the Internet and some brands dropped all their carefully crafted plans and jumped on the viral train as it passed by. Some did not though, some thought very carefully about the essence of content marketing; “producing high quality content assets on an ongoing basis to attract, engage, and convert your audience”. Taking part in a viral phenomenon does not mean that brands discard all of their brand messaging. It might not be easy to find that sweet spot each time to be reactive and fast and retain your messaging, tone, and create content aligned to your customer journey. Some brands managed to keep this in mind and create content that was aligned to their customer journey and brand messaging and yet was fun to read. Others just had fun last Friday and on the weekend 😉

Some brands will eventually find that sweet spot and have a viral hit, but there is no recipe for creating a viral hit, as described in a recent blog post by knowledge@wharton.

Here is a selection of what I found from many brands of various sizes. What do you think about the alignment to the customer journey in these posts?
I had a lot of fun looking through them. I will let you make your own mind up and tell me which brand posts you enjoyed the most:

[Tweet “Top Brands and #TheDress viral phenomenon. How aligned were they to their brand messaging?”]

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Clive Roach

Social media marketing expert with +15 years’ experience. Creates and deploys strategy, social listening, tactical planning, analytics, campaign calendar management, all while achieving revenue opportunities and cost savings.

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