The aim as social media marketers?

• To turn viral trends into brand-safe wins.
• React fast
• Stay on-brand
• Measure impact to convert buzz

Here is an example… the #TheDress viral trend. But how to get lasting engagement and revenue from such things?

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 past Oscar award events, like Lupita Nyong’o’s Oscars 2015 Calvin Klein dress. However, that excitement was surpassed 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 a few days later that dress, whatever colour you thought it was, went viral.

How to handle a viral moment?

Viral moments are amazing if you can steer the rocket. When a cultural flashpoint like #TheDress explodes, brands win by reacting fast and staying on-brand. This is not easy. You have to use your tone of voice, add genuine value (explain, entertain, or enable), and connect the moment to what you actually sell or supply. I recommend up front having a lightweight approval path, a clear “should we/shouldn’t we” checklist (brand fit, audience relevance, risk review), and a simple creative process for assets. Luckily at Philips I was involved in the creation of such a process 😉

#TheDress That Broke The Internet

I analysed the speed of the social media viral spread. There was minimal activity at first 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 early next morning.

#TheDress was so topical at its peak that ABC News ran a story on it on 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 colour vision deficiency.

Content Marketing Goes Out The Window?

“#TheDress has gone viral… get our response out there”. How many social media managers heard that? 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 with it 😉

Some brands eventually found that sweet spot and had 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 at that time. 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:

 

 

 

Wrap up the campaign

When the moment has passed wrap up by measuring campaign saves, shares, site traffic, and assisted conversions. I did this using social listening. Other advanced follow up tasks could be repurposing the best comments and questions into FAQs, ads, or email. Keep the post inclusive, credit original sources, and avoid claims that overreach the brand promise.