All of us are accustomed to exerting effort in order to influence others to our way of thinking. In business this is called marketing and involves advertising products and closing sales. In our personal lives, it’s the process of trying to influence, persuade, convince, or motivate others to shift perceptions or change the way we do things. It’s about sharing ideas. We “market” our ideas and we hope will become more popular. In social media, when we are successful at this, our ideas or marketing efforts can go “viral, ” or circulate widely.
You may well be working on promoting a business product–maybe it’s something new or maybe you’re hoping to increase the sales of an existing product. Or perhaps you are marketing an “idea,” hoping to change peoples behavior and get others to do something differently, e.g., picking up trash and putting it in the bin. You might be working for a non-profit organization working to raise money for a charity or to get people to be more caring towards the environment. There are numerous examples to be found in every business/organization/interest and in every interaction, none more so than the new media disciplines.
Using social media, the whole object of every interaction is not only to get your idea across to someone else, but to get these ideas, to take root. To be successful and for them to to catch on, they have to grow beyond your personal interaction and beyond your organization. They must spread far and wide and, hopefully, become pervasive and, to do that, they need to be special. It is not enough for you to love your idea, other people need to love it, too. And, they need to love it so much that they spread the idea far and wide. This is what we mean by “Viral.”
To find out how you get your ideas to go Viral, Contact us at Compass Marketing and let us plan the release of your next big idea and help you introduce it to the marketplace.