Sliding Into Obscurity

Posted on by Arick Wade

Going viral is similar to the medical term “virus” because viruses infect one person who infects another person and vice versa. Going viral online means that the people who viewed a video, a photo, or in this class’s case, a meme, were infected by the meme and passed it along online because a person was “infected” with emotions to share it. Hence, the viral project begins!

This Panda is going to a place no Panda has gone before

Primary Objective:

  • Go Viral

The picture above is the Meme I created with help from Google Images and Pic Collage, which helped me create the Meme. However, the primary objective of my marketing plan was to go viral, which is vague, but with that being the goal of the project, I placed that as my primary objective. Yet, after only 236 views despite multiple efforts on Twitter and Imgur to make it go viral, I failed my primary objective of my marketing plan.

Measurable Objectives:

  • Have a strong engagement with my four promoted posts via Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Once again, a measurable objective was involving strong engagement with my tweets involving my marketing plan. My marketing plan consisted of talking about how the weather has turned nice and “cuffing season” is over. “Cuffing season” is a slang term used to describe people more likely to be in relationships during the winter months. As it became Spring, I thought this would be a cool way to go viral.

However, after a few tweets sprinkled over the course of five days, I determined that this would not be a great way to go viral and I instead focused on the cuteness of a Panda sliding down a snowy slide and instead of making a slang term such as “Cuffing Season” as the basis for going viral, I focused on the Panda.

 

  • Get ten-plus favorites and 300+ engagements on multiples tweet

For this measurable objective, I accidentally said 300+ engagement when I meant 300+ impressions and with this Twitter Card tweet, I succeeded that with 700+ impressions from this tweet alone and it helped me create views, but minus the first two full days of the Meme Project and this promoted tweet, I did not gain much traction on views.

View post on imgur.com

 

  • Have over 500+ views total on Imgur with active engagement

As the view count stands right now, I am at 238 for my Imgur picture with five engagements of two upvotes and three downvotes, resulting in a -1 downvote for my picture. I am not sure who the other four people are who voted as I was one who upvoted the picture, but I did not reach all of my measurable objectives and it left a bittertaste in my mouth of how I could improve and what I could do to improve the Meme.

What worked/What didn’t/What I would do differently:

What worked well for me was the promoting the Twitter webcard. It opened my eyes to how much I could promote tweets on Twitter for a low price and how businesses have utilized Twitter webcards and Twitter Ads to help their business show up more frequently on people’s timelines. The simplicity of using a Twitter webcard helped my tweet gain more engagement and views for a low and efficient price.

What didn’t work was the obvious. It didn’t go viral for a variety of reasons. I only stuck to Twitter to promote my Meme, something I backtracked from my original Marketing Plan where I planned to post on Facebook, but my Facebook persona does not fit with the sharing of Meme’s and I did not want to change it for a project.

What I wish I could do instead was abandon the Imgur link and instead submit it to a Meme account on Instagram. In this day of age, I have not used Imgur to find a Meme in years, instead only viewing actual pictures. I find Memes through a variety of Instagram accounts and maybe being able to submit a Meme to a Meme account and measuring the virality based on likes could have been a cool way to measure engagement, but not being able to abandon the Imgur link made posting on Instagram a lot more difficult.

 

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