My objectives for the viral media project were as follows
Have over 500 clicks on the imgur link/views of the picture
Did it, with 1,293 views
Have at least 5 comments talking about how seeing this is better than seeing an ad
Completed, 5 comments exactly
Have at least 5 comments about how cute my cat is
Did not hit, only 1. However, this was more of a personal goal because I love my cat.
20 engagements with my ad
Completed, 30
Imgur Meme
Twitter Ad Spend & Card: For some reason, the impressions disappeared, so I also included the impressions from Twitter analytics
I hate ads, so I bought a twitter ad so you could see a picture of my cat instead of an ad
— Austin Natowitz (@AustinNato) April 4, 2018
Analysis
I think that my viral campaign was an absolute success. My original meme was a picture of Oshae Brissett, but after the dot voting revealed how unpopular it was I began thinking about how to target the meme at the internet. I figured, the internet loves cats, and it hates ads, so why not play off of that? Within an hour of uploading it onto imgur my meme had over 600 views largely due to my smart choice of tags (cute cat, cute animals, cats, kitten, and cute kitten). When it came to posting on my social media accounts my marketing plan shows a focus on Twitter as well as one post on Instagram. However, after our class lecture about why Instagram is a bad choice to get people to click on a link in the description, I decided to forgo that post. My post, including my twitter ad gained very positive feedback, albeit with not very many engagements. On imgur, there were two positive comments, one saying “I installed CatBlock on my wife’s computer for that very reason. Replaces every ad with pics of cats. Love this idea!” Another comment included a gif of Bryan Cranston as Walter White/Heisenberg saying “you’re goddamn right”. On Twitter, positive feedback included someone saying “thank you” as a response to my tweet and someone quote tweeting me saying “what a great guy”. My impressions for the Twitter ad totaled 1610, however, that included only 30 total engagements and worse, only generated 7 clicks on the link. I think the issue with my ad in getting link clicks is that they were already seeing a picture of my cat on Twitter, there wasn’t enough incentive to click through the link to see another picture. The number of impressions was positive, I got to that number by targeting animal-centered twitter users like @weratedogs @cats @picturecats @emergencycats and @emergencykittens.
At the end of the day, I was happy with my viral content challenge, because I correctly tapped into what I believed the internet would want to see. The best thing that I did with this project was changing my meme to target the general public better with a cat rather than a Syracuse basketball player. The second best thing was correctly picking tags on imgur and accounts on Twitter to target my meme correctly. In every class that I’ve had at Syracuse that focuses on consumers, the number one suggestion is “know your audience” in this instance, we couldn’t do any Sysomos data collection, so I am very proud of the fact that I successfully shot from the hip in this instance. However, moving forward, I know it is always better to do research before putting out any campaign like this one.