For our viral content challenge, I decided to make a meme of myself, incorporating the Crying Jordan theme. When the challenge began, we were in the midst of March Madness ending. The Syracuse Men’s team was knocked out of the tournament during our Final Four face off against UNC. The Syracuse Women’s team was in the national championship, battling it out with undefeated UConn. University Union’s Block Party tickets sold out. Graduation suddenly felt around the corner. There was a lot to be emotional about. When my good friend Jane Hong posted the original photo on Facebook, it got over 250 likes. And the photo wasn’t even of her!
With that being said, I thought Crying Jordan would have made a good fit for the viral content challenge.
I got moderatly good engagement. On Imgur, I got 2,215 views. Nine (9) downvotes and six (6) upvotes. The spike in views came from I shared the image to the Imgur community.
On Twitter, I recieved 12 favorites on the tweets where I posted the meme. In terms of actual engagement, not so much. I was hoping for this to be an interactive campaign where my peers would tweet back captions to the photo, but I only got that sort of engagement once.
Lesson learned, I think this reference only targeted serious sports fans. The Crying Jordan joke stems from something that happened a good five years old, and so, if you don’t understand the reference, you don’t understand the joke. I also think there may have been fatigue as the original photo was posted before and it got a lot of engagement. Regardless, it is by far one of my favorite memories at SU and I will always cherish the memory I had of making fun of myself for this campaign!