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Forget Viral

Phase 1: Late last year, 26-year old singer and third-place finisher on Canadian Idol Carly Rae Jepsen released a song (or earworm, depending on your point of view) titled “Call Me Maybe.”  The single banged around on Canadian radio stations, but only took off when some guy named Justin Beiber (yes, THAT Justin Beiber) was home for the holidays in December and heard the song playing playing on the radio.   He tweeted about it, and his 22 million followers on Twitter (yes, 22 million) started listening to and downloading the song, creating a pop sensation that has since won numerous awards.

Justin Bieber
Justin Bieber, mover of audiences

Phase 2: Jepsen also created a funny and straightforward video to accompany the song.  Bieber and his girlfriend create a tribute video lip-syncing to Jepsen’s video, and a meme is born.  117 million views later, the videos have spawned a whole subculture, with tributes created by Katy Perry, the Miami Dolphins cheerleaders, and even the Harvard men’s baseball team.

What can content marketers learn from the success of “Call Me Maybe”?  First, content must be high-quality.  Jepsen and her song would not have achieved so much success if the underlying content, the song and accompanying video, were not so freakishly compelling.  Quality means different things to different people — one man’s Amish Out of Order is another man’s Jersey Shore — but low-quality content has great difficulty generating an audience.

Second, social distribution is increasingly critical for content.  No matter the topic, social media allows individual content creators and curators to put ideas directly in front of interested and engaged people.  Those audiences can in turn create communities around the ideas and influences with which they identify.  Bieber and his 22 million followers, and Lady Gaga and her 34 million “friends” on Facebook, are just two of the best-known examples of content creators connecting directly with their audiences.

Social distribution by content creators ensures that a targeted and engaged audience sees the right content.  Bieber and now Jepsen’s direct connections with their audiences via Twitter, Facebook and other social networks allow these content creators to ensure that their most engaged audience members — aka fans — can consume content unobstructed by publishers, music labels, and other potential sources of friction in the content consumption chain.

Let’s be clear, this was NOT viral

What this should make clear is that “Call Me Maybe” was not actually a viral phenomenon.  Rather, it was a great example of a content creator — in this case Justin Bieber — influencing his audience.  He used publishing tools to put high-quality content in front of an engaged audience, who responded positively.  Content marketers would do well to emulate Jepsen, Bieber et al.

Which brings us to our third and final lesson from “Call Me Maybe”: audience development is becoming a core competency for content creators.  Stay tuned for a future blog post on this topic.


 


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