Last week, at our first Designing Change Meetup, we dove into the choices social impact organizations face when they're trying to create big impact on the cheap. Marco Greenberg, from Thunder11, and Erica Berger from Catchpool gave some great ideas and shared some amazing stories about content successes and failures they've had.
For those of you who couldn't make it, here are three key things they distilled were key when trying to get content to go 'viral:'
- Understand the context of viral. For every organization, or business this is probably something different. If you normally get 30 views on any video you post, and suddenly, you're getting 3000 - that might be considered 'viral' within context.
- Know your audience. Sometimes things are shared not because people love them, but because they hate them. Sometimes who you think is going to love your content, ends up not reading to the end. Try sharing your ideas with someone who's not invested in your project and see if they think it's as awesome as you do. This 'street-style' user testing will tell you a lot.
- Make memorable choices. You consume a lot of content every day, and the couple of blog posts or videos that you remember to bring up at that dinner party you'll go to on the weekend will be the pieces that probably go viral. What makes something memorable? One thing both Erica and Marco agreed on was human emotion. Pull at heart strings, get people riled up, help them identify with your story.
We'd love to hear your ideas on what are key choices to make when trying to design impactful content. In the meantime, signup for updates on our upcoming Meetups.